Verb second in Afrikaans: Is this a unitary phenomenon?

Abstract

The placement of the verb in Afrikaans is examined. Afrikaans has traditionally been analyzed as a typical verb-second (V2) Germanic language. Standard written Afrikaans is compared to modern spoken Afrikaans (MSA) in terms of the placement of the verb in both main & embedded clauses. Data are taken from grammaticality judgments provided by native speakers as well as from three corpora of approximately 80,000 words representing early Afrikaans, written standard Afrikaans & spoken Afrikaans. It is found that in written & early Afrikaans, main clauses are strictly V2. Embedded clause V2 is only permitted in the absence of a complementizer. Like the standard, MSA is also V2 in main clauses. MSA permits a greater degree of complementizer omission than does standard Afrikaans, & it furthermore allows V2 in embedded clauses in the presence of a complementizer & in embedded wh-interrogatives. V2 is accounted for in Minimalist terms by movement of V to C. It is proposed that while in standard Afrikaans, matrix clause C is associated with strong V features & embedded clause C with weak V features, this distinction is neutralized in MSA. This accounts for V2 wh-interrogatives in embedded contexts in MSA. For embedded declaratives, it is claimed that these are not instances of true V2 (V-in-C) but rather involve movement to T. 105 References. K. Ballantyne