rarum 79: (finite) verb-second word order in main declarative clauses (i.e., specifically VERB-second rather than more generally clitic-second or X-second)
Where found
many Germanic languages (IE), excluding English (ignoring a few marginal traces of V2); Sorbian (Slavonic, IE, influenced by German); Old French and some other early Romance lgs (IE) (???), Rhaeto-Romance (Romance, IE); Breton, Middle Welsh (Celtic, IE); Kashmiri (Dardic, Indic or Iranian, IE)
Domain
syntax
Subdomain
word order
Keywords
V2
Type
rarum
Universals violated
none
Source
Haiman, John (1974). Targets and Syntactic Change. The Hague: Mouton. Haider, Hubert & ??? (eds.) (1986). Verb Second Phenomena in Germanic Languages. Dordrecht: Foris. Adams, M. (1987). From Old French to the theory of pro-drop. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 5: 1-32. Vance, Barbara S. (1997). Syntactic Change in Medieval French: Verb-Second and Null Subjects. Dordrecht: Kluwer. Willis, David W. E. (1998). Syntactic Change in Welsh: A Study of the Loss of Verb-Second. Oxford: Clarendon. Schafer, Robin (1995). Negation and verb second in Breton. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 13: 135-172. Borsley, Robert D. & Andreas Kathol (2000). Breton as a V2 language. Linguistics 38: 665-710. ???
