On the Role of Syncretism in Finiteness Marking for Verb Second in Diachrony and Acquisition (original) (raw)
2019, The Sign of the V: Papers in Honour of Sten Vikner
This paper explores the long-debated interaction between infl ectional morphology and syntactic verb movement, more specifi cally the role of morphological fi niteness marking in the presence vs. absence of V2-structures in English, Danish and French. It will be argued that the cross-linguistic variation found in these languages may be accounted for by viewing fi niteness as a feature that cuts across tense, mood and agreement, following Eide (2016). Whereas the productive morphological rule generating regular verb forms in English collapses the fi niteness distinction, this type of syncretism is not found in Danish and French, and this appears to have major consequences in diachrony, language variation and language acquisition.
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The variation found across languages with respect to verb movement has been extensively discussed in the generative literature. Much of this discussion has been driven by the insight that verb movement seems to be related somehow to richness in inflectional morphology (agreement). This correlation, often referred to as the Rich Agreement Hypothesis (RAH), has been expressed in different ways. According to the strong version of RAH (cf. e.g. Rohrbacher 1999, Koeneman and Zeijlstra 2014), the relation between syntax and morphology is biconditional: A language has verb movement iff it has rich agreement. A weaker version of the RAH (cf. e.g. Bobaljik 2006, Bobaljik and Thrainsson 1998), suggests that rich agreement morphology entails the occurrence of verb movement but nothing can be said about languages with impoverished agreement morphology. Finally, certain authors argue that the RAH cannot be maintained at all, not even in its weaker form (e.g. Alexiadou and Fanselow 2002, Anderson...
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The Relation between Finiteness Morphology and Verb-Second: An Empirical Study of Heritage Norwegian
Selected Proceedings of the 8th Workshop on Immigrant Languages in the Americas (WILA 8), 2018
English is the only Germanic language known to have lost V2 word order in main clause declaratives. It has been proposed that the loss of V2 is caused by a preceding loss of morphologically expressed finiteness (M-finiteness) in the verbal morphology. This study tests this theory on North American Heritage Norwegian. Data are drawn from an elicitation task performed by nine Heritage Norwegian—English bilinguals. The theory is not found to give the correct empirical predictions: We find speakers who lack M-finiteness in their Norwegian language, but still produce a clear majority of V2 syntax, and one speaker who has M-finiteness, but a majority of non-V2 clauses. Additionally, there are homeland Norwegian dialects without M-finiteness that retain V2 in main clause declaratives. The morphology and syntax are found to be relatively unchanged from the homeland point of origin. The results of this study suggest that the loss of V2 in English and the non-V2 syntax displayed by the Heritage Norwegian speakers cannot be explained by means of verbal inflection.
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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.
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