36.3143, Books: Verb-third Phenomena in Germanic Verb-second Languages: Harchaoui and Modicom (eds.) (2025)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-36-3143. Fri Oct 17 2025. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 36.3143, Books: Verb-third Phenomena in Germanic Verb-second Languages: Harchaoui and Modicom (eds.) (2025)

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Date: 15-Oct-2025
From: Sebastian Nordhoff [support at langsci-press.org]
Subject: Verb-third Phenomena in Germanic Verb-second Languages: Harchaoui and Modicom (eds.) (2025)


Title: Verb-third phenomena in Germanic verb-second languages
Subtitle: Historical and variational perspectives
Series Title: Open Germanic Linguistics
Publication Year: 2025

Publisher: Language Science Press
           http://langsci-press.org
Book URL: https://langsci-press.org/catalog/book/486

Editor(s): Sarah Harchaoui, Pierre-Yves Modicom

eBook

Abstract:

With the exception of English and its varieties, all Present-Day
Germanic languages display some kind of verb-second (V2) rule,
according to which the finite verbal form has to be put in the second
position of the clause in declarative utterances. But even within the
Germanic domain, the exact contours of the V2 rule vary strongly in
time and space. Above all, the so-called bottleneck demanding that one
and only one constituent be placed before the finite verb is not
equally respected in all Germanic varieties. The typology of V2
violations, apparent or real, is now regarded as a core question for
the typology of V2 itself. The present volume is concerned with all
kinds of alleged “cracks in the bottleneck”, involving argument
stacking, remnant movement, or adverbial resumption. A general
introduction by Modicom and Harchaoui discusses the current state of
linguistic research on verb-third phenomena in Germanic languages,
both in synchrony and diachrony. The introduction is followed by a
diachronic panorama of V3 phenomena in the history of High German, by
A. Speyer, who shows that behind the apparent stability of V2, the
syntactic typology of apparent V3 in German has undergone significant
changes over the last centuries. The other contributions to the volume
follow this variational and historical thread: E. Klaevik-Pettersen
and N. Catasso discuss the validity of the bottleneck hypothesis in
present and ancient V2 varieties. E. Louviot, Th. Robin, Chr. Nilsen
and B. Bloom focus on verb-third phenomena involving resumptive items
in the history of English, High German, Low German and Swedish. In
their paper on Old West Germanic verse corpora, Louviot and Robin
concentrate on clause-initial tha/tho, investigating which factors
determine its capacity to either be followed by the finite verb (V2)
or by another constituent before the finite verb (V3). Nilsen is
concerned with the semantic evolution of verb-third adverbial
resumption involving da and så in Swedish. Bloom focuses on the V3 use
of one resumptive, so, in Early New High German during the 16th
century, tackling the discourse-organizational factors behind
adverbial resumption. Finally, the chapters by L. Riccardelli, R.
Madaro, A. Tomaselli and E. Bidese investigate how contact between
Germanic and Romance may have interacted with language-internal
dynamics in the history of several varieties of Rhaeto-Romance
(Riccardelli) and Upper German (Madaro, Tomaselli and Bidese).

Linguistic Field(s): Syntax

Language Family(ies): Germanic

Written In: English (eng)



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