Re: V2 languages

BP Jonsson skrev:

>Matt, while reading this and the other excamples you gave, I was more or
>less unconsciously translating them word-by-word into Swedish, and apart
>from the instances of object-first the word-order felt mostly "right" in
>Swedish.
>
>        [Johan] GAV [boken] [till Allis] [ig=E5r eftermiddag]
>
>is completely natural Swedish.  It would seem that Swedish is a V2 language
>with a main-clause WO very similar to German (but more consistently so than
>German, without that verb-last-in-sub-clause rule that makes all
>non-Germans hate their German-techers...)
>
>Do you agree?
Javisst, Swedish is definitely a V2 language.  ALL of the Germanic languages
are V2 except for English.  English used to be V2 as well, but started
drifting away from that during Middle English times.  Now there are only
a few vestiges of V2 left in English, such as the 'negative fronting'
construction (which many speakers find a little stilted):

        "Never HAVE we eaten at such an awful restaurant"
        "No more WILL we stand by while others oppress us"

However, I disagree that Swedish is more consistently V2 than German.
*Neither* German *nor* Swedish is V2 in subordinate clauses - it's just
that it's a little harder to tell in Swedish because most constituents
occur after the verb in either case.  However, if you look at where
negation goes, it becomes clear that subordinate clauses are not V2:

        "Jag har INTE laest den daer boken"
        "Johan vet att jag INTE har laest den daer boken"

(For the benefit of non-Swedish speakers, that's "I have not read that
book", and "Johan knows that I not have read that book".)

In the first sentence, "inte" must follow the tensed verb "har" because
of the V2 rule.  However, in the second sentence, "inte" precedes "har",
showing that the V2 rules is not in effect in subordinate clauses.
(Besides "inte", there are a few other adverbial-type elements which
demonstrate this variability in order, e.g. "fortfarande", "knappt",
etc..)

>BTW it never occurred to my conscious mind that Swedish and English was
>different in this respect.  Are they really?
Yes, they really are.  As Ray Brown said, in English it's possible to
put several constituents in front of the verb.  For instance, you can
say "Yesterday before noon I met John", where "yesterday", "before
noon", and "I" are all preverbal.  (I don't think you can do that in
Swedish.)  This is one respect in which English has become more like
its Romance neighbours and less like its Germanic cousins.

Matt.

------------------------------------
Matt Pearson
mpearson@ucla.edu
UCLA Linguistics Department
405 Hilgard Avenue
Los Angeles, CA 90095-1543
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