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Verb-third phenomena in Germanic verb-second languages: Historical and variational perspectives

What it is about

The volume collects studies of verb-third (V3): a finite verb that appears in third position in a clause where the verb-second rule would put it in second. The editors' introduction notes that every present-day Germanic language except English and its varieties has a V2 rule, and that the rule's exact form varies, so V3 is a window into the structure of the left periphery. The book has three parts: theory (generative accounts of the "bottleneck" in German and its varieties), historical perspectives on adverbial pronouns such as Old English þa, Old Saxon and Old High German thô, Swedish då and så, and areal variation (Rhaeto-Romance, German enclaves in northern Italy). The chapter on verse (Louviot and Robin) counts V3 in the Old English, Old Saxon and Old High German poems used in the study: 559, 699 and 700 instances of þa/thô, of which 330 Old English tokens are in initial position. Against Walkden's claim that V3 does not occur after initial þa, the chapter finds that it does occur in Old English verse, though it is a minority pattern. It tests the clitic-subject hypothesis against the information-structure hypothesis (Bech 2001).

Ideas

For Mova

The chapters are 8. Word order and phrase structure (inversion and clause order), 5. Auxiliaries and modals (where auxiliaries stand) and 29. Ellipsis, word order and information structure (information structure and order). The code is en/src/lin.rs, en/src/tok.rs and prag/src/frames.rs. The measure: the V2/V3/V-late split of adverb-initial clauses in an EModE sample, run twice, with a modern EWT sample as the control.

Cite

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

@book{harchaoui2025verb,
  title = {{Verb-third phenomena in Germanic verb-second languages: Historical and variational perspectives}},
  author = {Harchaoui, Sarah and Modicom, Pierre-Yves},
  year = {2025},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.16309627}
}

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