A conspiracy theory for the loss of V2 in Romance

Abstract

Sam Wolfe. This article presents corpus data from Middle French and Later Old Venetan to argue that a conspiracy of factors is necessary to destabilise the V2 property. Specifically, we suggest that late-stage V2 grammars can be rendered unstable through specialisation of the prefield, specialisation of the information-structural values of subjects occurring in inversion structures, an overall preference for left-peripheral base-generation over movement, and certain types of V3. Importantly, we conclude – in contrast to much previous work on V2 loss, but in line with recent analysis by Poletto (2019) – that no single factor alone will trigger the loss of V2.