German V2 and Doubly Filled COMP in West Germanic
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ORIGINAL PAPER
German V2 and Doubly Filled COMP in West Germanic Julia Bacskai-Atkari1
Received: 22 August 2018 / Accepted: 28 August 2019 / Published online: 11 August 2020 © The Author(s) 2020
Abstract The paper addresses the issue of Doubly Filled COMP effects in embedded interrogatives in West-Germanic languages, with particular attention paid to German: in these patterns, an overt interrogative operator co-occurs with an overt complementiser. Such configurations are ruled out from standard West-Germanic varieties, while they are attested in non-standard dialects. The paper argues that there are both theoretical and empirical arguments against the postulation of a Doubly Filled COMP Filter, proposing instead that the insertion of a visible complementiser in non-standard dialects in fact follows from the properties of the general syntactic paradigm in which empty complementisers are generally not possible. It is shown that doubling is not restricted to embedded constituent questions, but it may occur in polar questions as well. Further, the finiteness feature can be checked off by verb movement, as is the case in V2 patterns in German (and generally in Germanic, including historical English) and in T-to-C-movement in English. In this way, the property of V2 is linked to Doubly Filled COMP; in either case, there is no need to postulate a cartographic template with multiple projections but a minimal, merge-based model is sufficient and in fact favourable. The proposed model aims at accounting for the possible correlations between the properties of the head element and the properties of the fronted element merged as a specifier (if there is any). Finally, the observed syntactic differences between standard varieties and dialects in West Germanic can be attributed to minimal lexical differences. Keywords Complementiser · Doubly Filled COMP · Embedded interrogatives · Finiteness · Verb movement · Wh-movement
& Julia Bacskai-Atkari [email protected] 1
University of Konstanz, Universita¨tsstraße 10, 78457 Constance, Germany
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1 Introduction In Standard English, Standard German and Standard Dutch, there is no overt complementiser with an overt interrogative or relative operator. This is illustrated in (1) for English embedded interrogatives: (1) I don’t know who (*that) has arrived. As can be seen, the complementiser that is not permitted in Standard English in embedded constituent clauses. The same holds for relative clauses: (2) This is the city in which (*that) I live. The traditional idea regarding (1) and (2) is that there is a “Doubly Filled COMP Filter” prohibiting lexical material in both the specifier and the head of the same XP projection (see Koopman 2000, going back to Chomsky and Lasnik 1977). In the original proposal made by Chomsky and Lasnik (1977, 446), the idea is that the whelement and the complementiser both appear in the position “COMP” and are therefore essentially in complementary distribution (see also the observations made by Reis 1985).1 Howeve
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