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In:Word Order Change in Acquisition and Language Contact: Essays in honour of Ans van Kemenade
Edited by Bettelou Los and Pieter de Haan
[Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today 243] 2017
► pp. 79–99

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Chapter 5
Optional V2 in modern Afrikaans

Probing a Germanic peculiarity

 | University of Cambridge and Stellenbosch University
Published online: 14 December 2017
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/la.243.05bib
Abstract
This chapter investigates an embedded V2 option that features prominently in modern spoken Afrikaans, while being either completely barred or heavily restricted in other V2 languages: embedded wh-V2. This option, which is available in all wh-complements, freely alternates with its prescriptively correct V-final counterpart, and does not, as in colloquial varieties of English, bear the illocutionary force of a “true question”. To capture these peculiar distributional and interpretive facts, I propose a novel link to a further distinctive property of modern Afrikaans: its negative concord requirement. Appealing to the plausible origins of the obligatory clause-final nie-concord element as a discourse tag-element that would initially have been adjoined to CP, I argue that its prescriptively imposed obligatory integration into the clausal spine produced a new CP-peripheral projection, Pol(arity)P(hrase). Acquirers’ predilection to generalize the structures in their grammars led to PolP’s generalization to all clause-types, making modern-day Afrikaans clauses consistently “bigger” than those of its (West) Germanic counterparts. If McCloskey (2006) is correct in assuming that selected/complement Cs bar raised verbs – the so-called Kayne-Rizzi-Roberts effect – the presence of this extra, “insulating” layer will account for the consistent possibility of V2-creating V-to-C movement in all Afrikaans clausal complements, and not just those that permit this option in Germanic languages more generally.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2. The data and their interest
  • 3.A proposed analysis
    • 3.1 Negation in Modern Afrikaans
    • 3.2The diachrony of Afrikaans negation
    • 3.3The connection between Afrikaans nie2 and embedded wh-V2
  • 4.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
References (41)
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