Re: V2

I fear I don't know enough about V2 to comment, and it's been too long
since I read volume 2 (V2!) of Langacker's _Foundations of Cognitive
Grammar_, to remember whether it's mentioned there.  I first started
reading up on Cog. Gram. when I had very little exposure to any other
linguistic theory, so important and interesting things, such as
Langacker's unique treatment of "split ergativity" and all that, would
often whiz right past me, as I had hardly heard of ergativity before.

Now I don't have easy access to a university library any more, so the
literature isn't there for me.  Ah well.

Speaking entirely subjectively, I think that V2 is really really
cool, and it's one of the things I love about German.

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                       edheil@postmark.net
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dirk elzinga wrote:

> 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