V3 in Germanic: A comparison of urban vernaculars and heritage languages

Abstract

It is well known that varieties of Germanic do not display a strict V2 system whereby the finite verb is in the second position in main clauses. In this paper, we compare the Germanic heritage language American Norwegian with the Germanic urban vernacular Kiezdeutsch. We focus on declarative V3 structures and compare V3 properties in Kiezdeutsch with data from American Norwegian across several decades. Despite several surface similarities involving initial adjunct constituents followed by pronominal subjects, we argue that the two varieties differ in terms of how V3 structures emerge.