Adverbial Resumption in V2 Languages: The Background

Abstract

The goal of this chapter is to lay out the background assumptions that will underlie the discussions in the present volume, setting ‘adverbial resumption’, the core issue addressed in this volume, against the general background of the Verb Second (V2) pattern. Readers familiar with the literature on V2, on left dislocation structures in V2 and on resumptive patterns, will not find much new by way of empirical discoveries in this chapter and could skip it. However, the chapter provides a novel synthesis of the available literature. Section 2 provides a wider background for the volume, focusing on cases where the finite verb seemingly appears in a third position. In section 3, we provide an inventory of a set of empirical issues that arise in relation to adverbial V3 resumption. Many of these will be discussed in more detail in the individual contributions to the volume, which is to say that the goal of this section is to introduce properties that may be relevant in later discussions.