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Line Mikkelsen

Line Mikkelsen of U.C. Berkley will speak at the UCSD Linguistics Department Colloquium on January 25, 2010, at 2:00 pm in AP&M 4301.

Verb-second structures: Evidence from Danish VP anaphora

Most work on verb-second order in Germanic languages assumes that the choice of initial constituent in declarative verb-second clauses is a matter of textual organization which falls outside the domain of syntax. In this talk I give evidence that in at least one Germanic language there are intrasentential syntactic principles that restrict what may occupy initial position in declarative verb-second clauses. I further show how these principles bear on one of the central disagreements in the generative literature on Germanic clause structure, namely whether subject-initial verb-second clauses have the same structure as non-subject-initial verb-second clauses.