AG 1: Verb Second in Grammar and Processing: its Causes and its Consequences

Oliver Bott, Projekt CiC (XPrag.de), Universität Tübingen, Nauklerstraße 35, D-72074 Tübingen,
Tel.: 07071 29 77168, oliver.bott@uni-tübingen

Constantin Freitag, Universität Konstanz,
Fachbereich Sprachwissenschaft, Universitätsstraße 10, D-78457 Konstanz, Tel.: 07531 88
4753, constantin.freitag@uni-konstanz.de

Fabian Schlotterbeck, Projekt B1 (SFB833), Universität
Tübingen, Tel.: 07071 129 77157, fabian.schlotterbeck@uni-tuebingen.de

Website der AG 1: https://v2dgfs2016.wordpress.com/

Abstract

The verb second (V2) property seen in most Germanic but also in some other Indoeuropean or even extra-Indoeuropean languages may be part of a wider variational scenario in which particular features (as encoded in the finite verb) must be represented in the left clausal periphery (cf. Anderson, 1993). Although the V2 property has received much attention in the syntactic literature, there is still dissent which functional projections/steps of movement are involved in the derivation of V2 order or if it is even base generated. Furthermore, it is still unclear if the V2 order is a purely structural linearization condition, or if it is tied to the semantic component in narrow syntax, as proposed for German (Truckenbrodt, 2006). Every generalization must also consider the variation among V2 languages concerning basic word order, clause types which exhibit V2 (main clause, embedded clause, relative clause), and co-occurrence of V2 order and complementizers. ♦ L1-acquisition research suggests that children acquire the V2-property of German as a secondary step after having settled for head-final basic word order (Clahsen and Muysken, 1986). For L2-acquisition it is reported that the acquisition process runs through a fixed order of structural hypotheses which differ from L1-acquisition patterns. These findings suggest that the V2 is a derived order. ♦ Despite the consideration of V2 in theoretical work, the consequences of V2 for sentence processing have not received much attention. For instance, German has been mostly studied with respect to its underlying verb-final order. But the early availability of the morphological and lexical verb information in V1/V2 may have important consequences for the parsing process. For instance Knoeferle et al. (2005) showed that the verbal information is immediately used in anticipating upcoming event participants. Other aspects of verb related interpretation processes, however, such as covert reconstruction of quantifiers (Bott and Schlotterbeck, 2015), thematic prominence effects (Scheepers et al., 2000), and NPI licensing (Freitag and Bayer, 2015) seem to be delayed to the right clause boundary, i. e. the supposed base position of the finite verb. ♦ The main questions we want to address are: What is the structural analysis of the V2 position in different clause types? Is V2 only a linearization phenomenon, or is it tied to semantics/pragmatics? What is the role of V2 verbal information in sentence processing? Which aspects of the interpretation are immediately triggered by the verb in V2 position and which are assigned at its base position. ♦ We invite submissions that present theoretical or empirical contributions based on language-specific, cross-linguistic, diachronic, or language acquisition research on the empirical properties of phenomena that are caused by, or correlate with the V2 property. Theoretical proposals should make clear-cut predictions that allow for experimental falsification. Experimental approaches, on the other hand, should address the predictions of theoretical implementations. By bringing together the above mentioned lines of research, we hope to come one step closer to a deeper understanding of V2, and to find directions for future research.

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