Hidden verb second

The aim of the work is to provide some detailed insight into the mechanisms that regulate movement to the left periphery on the empirical basis of an up to now rather poorly investigated German variety, i.e. Cimbrian. We first show that Cimbrian still possesses the V2 property in the sense that the inflected verb moves to the left periphery of the clause. Five empirical arguments are discussed in favor of this hypothesis concerning the existence of a prefield-expletive of the German 'es' type, the order of clitics, of negation, of separable prefixes and of the particle da with respect to the inflected verb. We propose that V3 instances, which apparently violate the V2 linear restriction, are to be analyzed as involving Topics located higher than the C projection where the inflected verb moves. We also show that wh-elements are to be split into two classes, which are moved to two different specifiers in the layered left periphery of the clause. This split is a function of the internal structure of the wh-items, which can contain or not a lexical restrictor, which is in turn related to two different interpretations (i.e. de dicto and de re) of the wh-item itself. Key words:?left periphery; Cimbrian; wh-items; verb second; Topics