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Arthur Holmer

The place of Swedish in word order typology

Keywords: embedded verb-second, subordinate clauses, Germanic, Kashmiri, complementizer

This paper outlines the basic facts of Swedish clause-level word order, in particular the distribution of the verb-second (V2) phenomenon. A sample of other (Germanic and non-Germanic) V2 languages is discussed, and possible correlates of embedded V2 are explored. Finally, it is claimed that cross-linguistic facts suggest that embedded V2 does not involve recursion of a discrete category C (the prototypical complementizer position), but rather that what is referred to as C in the generative V2 literature is a trivial clustering of syntactic features onto a single (unlabelled) head.

STUF – Sprachtypologie und Universalienforschung, Akademie Verlag

Print ISSN: 0942-2919
Volume: 59, 01/2006
Pages: 076 - 102

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