The Shift to Head-Initial VP in Germanic (original) (raw)
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VO/OV base-ordering in the Germanic languages
Richard Page & Michael T. Putnam (eds.) 2020. Cambridge handbook of Germanic linguistics (chapter 15).p.339-364. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108378291.016
This paper surveys major syntactic contrasts that are triggered by the head-initial (VO) vs. head-final structure of the VP (OV) in Germanic languages: the position of nominal arguments, scrambling, object shift, the serialization of particles and resultative items, the compactness of head-initial phrases, the contiguity requirement for left-adjoined phases to head-initial VPs or NPs, the serialization of auxilaries, subject expletives in VO, and verb clustering in OV.
2012
With these studies, I present 14 papers dedicated to exploring different issues concerning basic word order and synchronic and diachronic variation in word order, written in the years 2000-2007. After my dissertation on restructuring infinitives in West Germanic, I have started to examine the nature of variation in the headcomplement parameter focussing on (synchronic) comparative investigations on word order in German and English. On the basis of the wide-held opinion (cf. Kemenade 1987) that English started out as an OV-language, I have extended these investigations with diachronic studies, since the development of English promised to yield interesting insights into the nature of this parameter. As it turns out, both English and German started out with mixed OV/VO orders (cf. Pintzuk 1999 for English and Hinterholzl 2010 for German), raising new and interesting questions about the nature of the variation and about the factors responsible for the development of word order in the tw...
The origin and evolution of word order
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2011
Recent work in comparative linguistics suggests that all, or almost all, attested human languages may derive from a single earlier language. If that is so, then this language-like nearly all extant languages-most likely had a basic ordering of the subject (S), verb (V), and object (O) in a declarative sentence of the type "the man (S) killed (V) the bear (O)." When one compares the distribution of the existing structural types with the putative phylogenetic tree of human languages, four conclusions may be drawn. (i) The word order in the ancestral language was SOV.
Information Structure and Syntactic Change in Germanic and Romance Languages, 2014
In this paper, I argue that the distinction between OV and VO word orders should not be accounted for by a distinction in the base. More specifically, I argue that this distinction can be reduced to the workings of two parallel interface conditions that define the optimal mapping from syntax to PF and from syntax to LF, respectively. I discuss how mixed OV/VO orders in Old High German and Old English can be accounted for in this framework and then lay out the historical conditions and the possible grammatical factors that made English develop into a PF-transparent VO language and German into a scope-transparent OV language. 1. In the entire Tatian translation the sign "&" is used as an abbreviation for the string "et"; thus "giqu&an" stands for "giquetan".
Verb particles and OV/VO in the history of English
Studia Linguistica, 2014
Verb particles (e.g. up, out, off, down, away) are a well-known and well studied feature of English and of Germanic languages in general. Nevertheless, the functional and categorial status of English verb particles remains debated, and, especially in the diachronic literature on OV/VO word-order change, this question is typically avoided entirely. This lack of precision about the nature of verb particles is surprising, given the central role attributed to verb particles as diagnostic elements for basic word order. We motivate an analysis of English verb particles as (optionally) projecting intransitive prepositions which function as secondary predicates. In relation to the OV/VO issue, we claim that, although there is a statistically strong cross-Germanic correlation between the position of verb particles and verb complements, the position of verb particles is not a diagnostic for OV/VO order. To support this claim, we will show that there is no one-to-one correspondence a) between Prt-V surface word order and an underlying OV grammar, or b) between V-Prt surface word order and an underlying VO grammar. Moreover, it will be shown that OV order with DPobjects in early Middle English is highly discourse-sensitive, suggesting that OV order with DP-objects is not determined by phrase structure, but by discoursesensitive scrambling from a VO base. 1. The status of verb particles in the history of English English particle verbs have received a huge amount of attention in the synchronic literature and many different analyses have been proposed to account for their properties (cf.
Changes in English word order and the loss of VSO
2009
The present paper investigates the Verb-Subject-Object order in the history of English. On the basis of current theoretical approaches to word order, we argue that in the diachrony of English, both derivations of VSO order (cf. Roussou & Tsimpli 2006) could be found. VSO clauses are allowed due to the strong D-features of English until the 12 th century (when English DPs were inflected for case and phi-features); however, VSO orders were not lost in Middle English (when the loss of case distinctions occurred) as Middle English changed to a CP-V2 language (cf. Kroch & Taylor 1997).
On the correlation between morphology and syntax
Studies in comparative Germanic …, 2002
In this paper we revisit V-to-I-movement in Germanic and beyond. We examine and evaluate the hypothesis that there is a correlation between richness of verbal inflectional morphology and the obligatory movement of the finite verb to Infl, which has been adopted in much recent literature. We show that this hypothesis is empirically inadequate, and that in fact V-to-I movement across languages is independent of morphology.
Basic Order : A Significant Difference Between English VO and German OV
2000
In the generative research on German and Dutch syntax there has been an intensive controversy about the proper representation of the order of constituents. One of the various reasons is that these languages show a peculiar mix of verb-finality and verb-initiality. While nominal arguments and various other constituents such as adverbs and PPs normally line up on the left projection line of the verb, clausal complements clearly disturb this picture of head-finality: Sentential infinitives (with zu) tend to be extraposed; finite complements which are introduced with a complementizer or which show the V2-pattern appear in the overwhelming number of cases in extraposed position, i.e. in a place traditionally called the “Nachfeld”. Putting them in direct object position generally leads to straight ungrammaticality.