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On the Rich Agreement Hypothesis and varieties of embedded V2

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 August 2019

Hans-Martin Gärtner
Hans-Martin Gärtner*
Affiliation:
Research Institute for Linguistics, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Benczúr utca 33, 1068 Budapest, Hungary
*
Email for correspondence: [email protected]
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Abstract

This paper addresses the controversy between Koeneman & Zeijlstra (K&Z) (2014) and Heycock & Sundquist (2017) concerning the viability of K&Z’s strong version of the Rich Agreement Hypothesis in the light of apparent counterexamples from the diachrony of Danish. It makes the general point that establishing whether or not cases of putative V-to-I movement in subordinate clauses can be reanalyzed as V-to-C, i.e. as embedded Verb Second (EV2), depends on the EV2-type of a language. The empirical discussion concerns appositive relatives and conditional protases, with V-to-C in the former being in principle compatible with ‘narrow’ nEV2 as displayed by Modern Mainland Scandinavian languages, and V-to-C in the latter with Old Norse-style ‘broad’ bEV2. It is concluded that the critical stages of Danish need to be scrutinized more closely before the above dispute can be settled.

Keywords

appositive relativesassertionconditionalsembedded Verb Secondrich agreementV-to-I
Type
Research Article
Information
Nordic Journal of Linguistics , Volume 42 , Issue 2 , October 2019 , pp. 209 - 225
Copyright
© Nordic Association of Linguistics 2019 

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