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

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)