This volume provides the most exhaustive and comprehensive treatment available of the Verb Second property, which has been a central topic in formal syntax for decades. While Verb Second has traditionally been considered a feature primarily of the Germanic languages, this book shows that it is much more widely attested cross-linguistically than previously thought, and explores the multiple empirical, theoretical, and experimental puzzles that remain in developing an account of the phenomenon. Uniquely, formal theoretical work appears alongside studies of psycholinguistics, language production, and language acquisition. The range of languages investigated is also broader than in previous work: while novel issues are explored through the lens of the more familiar Germanic data, chapters also cover Verb Second effects in languages such as Armenian, Dinka, Tohono O'odham, and in the Celtic, Romance, and Slavonic families. The analyses have wide-ranging consequences for our understanding of the language faculty, and will be of interest to researchers and students from advanced undergraduate level upwards in the fields of syntax, historical linguistics, and language acquisition.

This series publishes original contributions which describe and theoretically analyze structures of natural languages. The main focus is on principles and rules of grammatical and lexical knowledge both with respect to individual languages and from a comparative perspective. The volumes cover all levels of linguistic analysis, especially phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics, including aspects of language acquisition, language use, language change, and phonetical and neuronal realization.

This monograph investigates the syntax of the finite verb in Mòcheno, a minority language spoken in a German speech island of Northern Italy. Basing her study on detailed new data collected during extensive fieldwork, and focusing on finite verb movement; on multiple access to the left periphery; on pro licensing and on the distribution of OV/VO word orders, the author refutes the traditional view that the syntactic variation found in Mòcheno is due to the presence of two competing grammars as a consequence of contact with Romance varieties and accounts for the peculiarities of Mòcheno syntax within a theory couched in the framework of Generative Grammar. This book contributes to our understanding of the verb-second phenomenon and sheds new light on the asymmetries between Old Romance and Germanic verb-second languages. A useful tool for all linguists working on both theoretical and comparative syntax and to anyone interested in language variation, dialectology and typology.

This volume provides the first book-length study of the controversial topic of Verb Second and related properties in a range of Medieval Romance varieties. The findings have widespread implications for the understanding of both the key typological property of Verb Second and the development of Latin into the modern Romance languages.

This book addresses a general phenomenon in the European languages: verb second. The articles provide a comprehensive survey of synchronic vs. diachronic developments in the Germanic and Romance languages. New theoretical insights into the interaction of the properties of verbal mood and syntactic structure building lead to hypotheses about the mutual influence of these systems. The diachronic change in the syntax together with changes in the inflectional system show the interdependence between the syntactic and the inflectional component. The fact that the subjunctive can license verb second in dependent clauses reveals further dependencies between these subsystems of grammar. "Fronting finiteness" furthermore constitutes an instance of a main clause phenomenon. Whether "assertion" or "at-issueness" are encoded through this grammatical process will be a matter in the debates discussed in the book. Moreover, information structure appears to be directly related to the fronting of other constituents in front of the finite verb. Questions concerning the interrelations between these various subcomponents of the grammatical system are investigated.

This volume provides the most exhaustive and comprehensive treatment available of the Verb Second property, which has been a central topic in formal syntax for decades. While Verb Second has traditionally been considered a feature primarily of the Germanic languages, this book shows that it is much more widely attested cross-linguistically than previously thought, and explores the multiple empirical, theoretical, and experimental puzzles that remain in developing an account of the phenomenon. Uniquely, formal theoretical work appears alongside studies of psycholinguistics, language production, and language acquisition. The range of languages investigated is also broader than in previous work: while novel issues are explored through the lens of the more familiar Germanic data, chapters also cover Verb Second effects in languages such as Armenian, Dinka, Tohono O'odham, and in the Celtic, Romance, and Slavonic families. The analyses have wide-ranging consequences for our understanding of the language faculty, and will be of interest to researchers and students from advanced undergraduate level upwards in the fields of syntax, historical linguistics, and language acquisition.

This book is the study of two different kinds of variation across the Germanic languages. One involves the position of the finite verb, and the other the possible positions of the "logical" subject in constructions with expletive (or "dummy") subjects. The book applies the theory of Principles-and-Parameters to the study of comparative syntax. Several languages are considered, including less frequently discussed ones like Danish, Faroese, Icelandic, and Yiddish.

How children acquire competence in verb placement in languages in which verb placement in matrix clauses does not coincide with that in embedded clauses is not well understood. Verb-Second languages like German and Dutch display the verb-final pattern in embedded clauses, which can be confusing for a developing child. This book addresses this problem in the context of Swiss German, itself a Germanic dialect. Numerous examples are given of natural language produced by two children who were consistently followed between the ages of 4 and 6. Unexpectedly, since previous literature has suggested that children master verb placement very early in their linguistic development, these children move the verb in any type of embedded clause, leading to many verb-placement errors. After introducing the problem and describing the data in detail, a technical analysis is developed in terms of a minimally split-CP, which is rather successful in accounting for these data. The book should interest advanced students and researchers in both language acquisition and syntax.

3. 1 Kashmiri is not "non-Configurational" 45 3. 1 . 1 Agreement 51 3 . 1. 2 Binding Theory 52 3. 1. 3 Distribution of PRO 56 3 . 1. 4 Additional Evidence 57 3. 1. 4. 1 Weak Crossover (WCO) 57 3. 1. 4. 2 Constituent Fronting 60 3. 1. 4. 3 Superiority-Like Effects 62 3. 2 Word Order Constraints: Kashmiri Phrase Structure 64 3. 2. 1 N-complements 65 3. 2. 2 Postpositions 67 3. 2. 3 Adjectives 67 3. 2. 4 The Structure ofVP 68 3. 3. The Functional Projections 71 3. 4 Complement ki clauses 74 3. 5 Summary 79 4 Verb-Second (V2) Phenomena 80 4. 0 Introduction 80 4. 1 Kashmiri Vo rfe ld 84 4. 1. 1 V2 Clauses 85 4. 1. 1. 1 Main Clauses 85 4. 1. 1. 2 ki-Clauses 98 4. 1. 2 V3 Clauses 102 4. 1. 2. 1 Declarative Clauses 102 4. 1. 2. 2 Interrogative Clauses 107 4. 2 Some Exceptional Orders 116 vm 4. 2. 1 VI Order 116 4. 2. 1. 1 Declaratives 116 4. 2. 1. 2 Yes/No Questions 120 V-Final Order 4. 2. 2 121 4. 2. 2. 1 Relative Clauses and Adverbial Clauses 121 4. 2. 2. 2 Nonfinite Clauses 126 4. 3 Summary 129 5 Motivating Verb Movement 131 5. 0 Introduction 131 5. 1 The "Standard" Account 131 5. 2 Yiddish and Icelandic 136 5. 2. 1 Diesing (1990) 138 5. 2. 2 Weerman (1989) 141 5. 2. 3 Vikner (1991) 146 5.