Theiling Online    Sitemap    Conlang Mailing List HQ   

Re: THEORY: CP-V2 vs. IP-V2

From:John Cowan <cowan@...>
Date:Wednesday, May 19, 1999, 21:23
JOEL MATTHEW PEARSON wrote:

> Personally, I'm highly skeptical of this account, since it would > seem to suggest that Old English (or its Germanic ancestor; not sure how > far back we're going here)
OE, or perhaps proto-OE.
> didn't have embedded clauses, which seems > very unlikely. A more plausible story, I think - although I confess I > don't know the facts - is that the "that" originally started out as a > determiner restricting the embedded clause,
The trouble here, IIRC (and I'm no Anglo-Saxonist) is that the form of "that" in question has to be a pronoun, not anything else. Apposition is still possible, I guess.
> And I think there's pretty good evidence for saying > that "that" is part of the embedded clause, e.g.:
Your arguments are good, especially 2.
> A Yiddish-speaking friend of mine (who is not a native speaker, but > used to be quite fluent) informs me that it's possible to say EITHER "Es > is shver tsu zayn a Yid" ("is", not "ist")
Oops.
> OR "Es is shver a Yid tsu zayn".
I wonder if this is contamination from High German. Yiddish is shot through with HG borrowings, especially in syntax: in many ways HG serves as the H variety (in the sense of diglossia) to Yiddish L. (Hebrew is also an H.)
> IP-V2 CP-V2 > > Obj - Inf Kashmiri(?) German > Dutch > > Inf - Obj Icelandic Swedish > Norwegian > Danish > > both Yiddish ??
Fascinating!
> I don't > recall whether Old English was supposed to be IP-V2 or CP-V2 - > probably IP-V2, since having V2 in embedded clauses seems > like a reasonable first step towards losing V2 altogether > (as English did sometime during the Middle English period).
I ran across the terms in a paper arguing that OE was firmly IP-V2, but that the northern dialect of early ME became CP-V2 under heavy Danish influence. Of course, it was hard for me to understand what the paper was talking about! I shall go back and read it now, hopefully with greater understanding. The paper is at http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~kroch/omev2-html/omev2-html.html for those who care. -- John Cowan http://www.ccil.org/~cowan cowan@ccil.org You tollerday donsk? N. You tolkatiff scowegian? Nn. You spigotty anglease? Nnn. You phonio saxo? Nnnn. Clear all so! 'Tis a Jute.... (Finnegans Wake 16.5)