Agreement and remnant movement in the domain of West-Germanic verb movement (original) (raw)

Studies on Old High German Syntax: Left sentence periphery, verb placement and verb-second

Diachronica, 2008

Syntactic analysis of an historical language at the level of detail and rigor required by modern standards of syntactic description is a difficult undertaking. The challenges are particularly great in a case like that of Old High German (hereafter, OHG), whose corpus is not only scant but widely variable along dimensions of dialect, date and genre and generally fraught with indeterminacies, contradictions, exceptions and gaps, and whose prose consists almost exclusively of translations with variable degrees of faithfulness to the Latin model. Axel builds a compelling case that extracting syntactic generalizations from this problematic corpus is not only doable, with sufficient care and ingenuity, but a crucial undertaking, given the situation of OHG in the development of Germanic syntax. On the one hand, OHG is more modern in a number of respects than its sister Germanic languages. Unlike Gothic and Old English, it no longer demonstrates unambiguously verbfinal main clauses. And while Gothic exhibits what has been claimed recently to be a particle-typing syntax, in which the illocutionary force of sentence is encoded by particles (e.g., the-u of yes/no questions), rather than verb position, OHG has moved markedly in the direction of the modern pattern of encoding sentence typing by verb position (e.g., verb-second (V-2) in declaratives, verb-first (V-1) in yes/no interrogatives). While Gothic seems to have been a strong pro-drop language like Greek, OHG exhibits a much more restricted sort of pro-drop. On the other hand, OHG is still not fully modern in its clausal syntax, still differing from NHG in a number of respects. While it generally exhibits verb-final subordinate clauses, it allows constituents to follow the subordinate verb with greater freedom than NHG. While it moves the verb leftward in all main clauses, it is not as strict a V-2 language as NHG, allowing both verb-first declarative sentences and verbthird sentences to a greater extent than does the latter. While it mainly signals illocutionary type by verb position, Axel claims that it preserves at least vestiges of an earlier particle-typing syntax. While it allows pro-drop less freely than does Gothic, it still permits it in more contexts than does NHG. Thus, OHG is a language caught midway between the syntax of early Germanic and that of NHG, and therefore a promising domain in which to explore in detail syntactic change in the clausal periphery. It is doubly interesting since a number of the transitions

The fundamental left–right asymmetry in the Germanic verb cluster

The Journal of Comparative Germanic Linguistics, 2016

observes that there is an asymmetry in the possible ordering of dependents of a lexical head before versus after the head. A reflection on some of the concepts needed to develop Cinque's ideas into a theory of neutral word order reveals that dependents need to be treated separately by class. The resulting system is applied to the problem of word order in the Germanic verb cluster. It is shown that there is an extremely close match between theoretically derived expectations for clusters made up of auxiliaries, modals, causative 'let', a main verb, and verbal particles. The facts point to the action of Cinque's fundamental left-right asymmetry in language in the realm of the verb cluster. At the same time, not all verb clusters fall under Cinque's generalization, which, therefore, argues against treating all cases of restructuring uniformly.

Revisiting the Loss of Verb Movement in the History of English: Evidence From Adverb Placement

Haeberli & Ihsane, NLLT, 2016

Most of the discussions of the loss of verb movement in the history of En- glish have focused on data related to the rise of do-support. In this paper, we extend the empirical basis to evidence from adverb placement. Our analysis of the distribu- tion of finite main verbs with respect to adverbs in a range of prose texts in the history of English shows that the decline of V-movement in English starts in the middle of the 15 th century and that verb movement past adverbs is lost to a large extent around the middle of the 16 th century. These observations differ considerably from what data involving the sentential negator not indicate. According to that evidence, the loss of verb movement is a rather long process starting in the 16th century and coming to completion over 200 years later. In order to reconcile the conflicting diachronic ev- idence from adverb placement and the syntax of negation, we propose that the loss of verb movement in English is not a single event but occurs sequentially. In a first phase, verb movement to T is lost while movement to a lower inflectional head is maintained. In a second phase, verb movement starts being lost completely. We show that the Rich Agreement Hypothesis, which has been very prominent in accounts of variation with respect to verb movement, cannot capture these developments in a sat- isfactory way. Instead, it is verbal morphology more generally that will be argued to play a role in connection with the occurrence of verb movement. However, we do not postulate a strong correlation between morphology and syntax and propose that the loss of verb movement in English is the result of a combination of factors: changes in the verbal morphosyntax (loss of subjunctive, rise of periphrastic forms), an ac- quisitional bias towards simpler structures, the decline of the subject-verb inversion grammar found in early English, and effects of dialect contact.

Subjects, Tense and Verb-Movement in Germanic and Romance

2008

Abstract: This paper takes a closer look at the attraction properties of T. It highlights an empirically attested distinction between rich agreement inflection, exhibited by null-subject languages, and rich tense inflection, found in Romance, but not Germanic, and argues for the syntactic relevance of this distinction. We propose a novel typology of the ways in which T’s featural requirements can be satisfied, and, focusing on tense requirements, show how the typology enables us to understand the verb-movement behaviour of the Romance languages vis-à-vis their Germanic counterparts. We also show how the proposed analysis facilitates a new understanding of relevant aspects of the modern English verbal system and its diachrony.