Re: Verb-second ... verb-penultimate languages?

[Delurking:]

> Does anyone know of any verb-penultimate languages?
If by this you mean the mirror image of V2 languages, the
answer appears to be "there are none". This fact has been
taken by Kayne inter alios to be a result of the fact that
all languages are underlyingly SVO, and any surface deviation
from that fact is the result of the various movement operations.
(This of course cannot be falsified, since you can always keep
moving, but that doesn't stop Kayne.  When I was at the LSA last
summer, he made the claim that all -ing forms in English are
completely regular, and I had to pipe up that in my dialect
the participle of the verb "to lightning" is "lightning",
not "lightninging", to which he responded that it was probably
some haplological phonological fact.  This can't be true for me,
however, since I do say "singing".)

 =========================================================================
Thomas Wier	       "I find it useful to meet my subjects personally,
Dept. of Linguistics    because our secret police don't get it right
University of Chicago   half the time." -- octogenarian Sheikh Zayed of
1010 E. 59th Street     Abu Dhabi, to a French reporter.
Chicago, IL 60637

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