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THEORY: V2 word order (yet again)

From:Tristan McLeay <conlang@...>
Date:Thursday, January 6, 2005, 14:29
G'day, I was fiddling around with Føtisk's word order (I'm currently
taking a very long time to reply to a very short on-topic post someone
made a few weeks ago about the subject) and as a Germanic language
closely related to Old English, I thought I should learn about OE's V2
word order.

I came across <http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~kroch/omev2-html/node7.html>
(previously discussed on this list:
<http://listserv.brown.edu/archives/cgi-bin/wa?
A2=ind9905C&L=conlang&P=R17948>, that thread served its purpose at
least twice!). On that page I've linked to, it presents some
apparentlyexceptional V2 word orders, one of which (6b) is the example:
   þa   ge-mette he sceaðan
   then met      he robbers
As far as I can see, this is perfectly normal V2 word order---one
element (then) is before the verb, so the verb and subject flip. Why is
this exceptional? All the sentences on that page have the verb in the
first position (well, I spose that depends on whether _ne_/'not' takes
as a position or is part of the verb's place I spose), and it seems to
be saying the same thing.

(Incidentally, if I was speaking a V2 language, would I've said:
    As far as can I see, is this perfectly normal V2 word order...
or does the fact that the 'AFAICS' bit is before a comma, does that not
have some sort of effect on the element-counting?)

fance fe /fank@ fe/
--
Tristan.

Reply

Philip Newton <philip.newton@...>