The diachrony of V3 in German (and some similarities with Old English)

In this paper, we present the results of a large-scale corpus study of so-called V3 word orders in the history of German. The umbrella term ‘V3’ will be used to refer to main clauses in which the finite verb has moved into a left-peripheral head and the preverbal area of the CP is occupied by more than one element, irrespective of the number of items occupying this domain. In particular, the focus will be on the typology of the attested preverbal sequences in V3 clauses and their syntactic analysis. The existing literature on V3 has dealt with such phenomena in very different ways, relying on disparate conceptual premises and methods. By analyzing all diachronic data in a uniform way and within the same theoretical framework (the cartographic model), this paper seeks to alleviate this deficiency. The data are extracted from three digital corpora of Historical German by adopting the same diagnostics for the different language stages. It will be shown that the syntax of German exhibits basic continuity with respect to the possible V3 sequences allowed. The same criteria are then tentatively applied to a pilot sample of Old English clauses extracted from the York Corpus of Old English Prose. Whereas interesting parallelisms can be individuated, some asymmetries with respect to Old High German emerge, which open up new interesting avenues for future research.