Re: V2

On Mon, 29 Nov 1999, Jeffrey Henning wrote:

> I saved this thread to re-read.  Some questions:
>
> Is there any advantage to V2?
>
> Is there a reason for V2?
I suppose functional/cognitive linguists could make an argument for both
reasons and advantages of this pattern, although I'm not familiar enough
with the literature to comment. Perhaps Ed has some insight here?

From the point of view of Indo-European, V2 in Germanic is a
manifestation of Wackernagel's Law (WL), according to which unstressed
sentential elements gravitated to the second position in the sentence.
The thought is that in Germanic, finite verbs were stressless, and thus
fell under WL. (There's a fine article by Stephen R. Anderson in the
March 1993 issue of _Language_ which goes into gory detail about second
position phenomena from a morphological/prosodic point of view.)

There are about half a dozen different syntactic analyses that I've seen
for V2 (all within the generative tradition), but they all seem to agree
that there is leftward movement of a verb to a position directly
following a topicalized argument. Matt might be better placed to provide
a description.

> Dublex seems to be V2, except it is possible to have the subject, direct
> object and indirect object omitted -- in which case the verb is first.  So I
> assume this means it isn't V2?
Not necessarily; just that there are other imperatives which take
precedence over the V2 pattern. Once upon a time, I was really taken by
the idea of V2, and tried to incorporate it in an early conlang, 'Eza.
The result was genuine V2, but was rather wooden and lifeless (as was
the rest of the lg), and I abandoned it when I began working on Tepa. In
re The Conlang Instinct, I notice that the vowels of both language names
are -e-a, and both roots mean 'speak, speech'; also, both contain a
medial voiced fricative (intervocalic /p/ is realized as [B] in Tepa).

My latest project, Shemspreg, is becoming V2, which suits me fine since
it is derived from PIE in the first place, where V2 arose.

Dirk

--
Dirk Elzinga
dirk.elzinga@m.cc.utah.edu