Language contact and V3 in Germanic varieties new and old

Certain recently-attested varieties of Germanic V2 languages are known to deviate from the strict V2 requirement characteristic of the standard. This is the case, for example, for Kiezdeutsch, a new German dialect, as well as urban vernacular varieties of Danish, Norwegian and Swedish: descriptively...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:The journal of comparative Germanic linguistics 2017-04, Vol.20 (1), p.49-81
Main Author: Walkden, George
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Comparative Linguistics
Danish language
Diachronic linguistics
Dialects
German language
Germanic Languages
Grammatical subject
Language contact
Language varieties
Linguistics
Norwegian language
Old English
Original Paper
Social Sciences
Swedish language
Syntactic analysis
Syntax
Theoretical Linguistics
Verbs
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:Certain recently-attested varieties of Germanic V2 languages are known to deviate from the strict V2 requirement characteristic of the standard. This is the case, for example, for Kiezdeutsch, a new German dialect, as well as urban vernacular varieties of Danish, Norwegian and Swedish: descriptively speaking, in these varieties, subject-verb inversion may be absent under certain well-defined conditions. In this article I outline those conditions and the type of syntactic analysis required to account for them, claiming that an articulated left periphery is needed to account for the findings. The similarity of the V3 patterns found in these new varieties, which are geographically isolated from each other but which share a characterization in terms of the demographics of their speaker groups, invites a diachronic account in terms of language contact. I argue that transfer cannot account for V3, but that a scenario of sequential simplification and complexification is able to do so. Finally, turning to Old English, which exhibits similar (though not identical) V2/V3 alternations, I argue that a similar synchronie analysis can be upheld and that its diachronic origins may well also have been similar—a case of using the present to inform our approach to the past.
ISSN:1383-4924
1572-8552
DOI:10.1007/s10828-017-9084-2