Old French as a V2 Language

Abstract

Thurneysen (1892) was the first to note that in Old French (OFr) the finite verb tends to be in second position of a main clause regardless of the nature of the initial constituent, much as in Modern German. In the more recent literature, the term “verb-second language” has been used in both a descriptive and a theoretical sense for languages of this type. Although the term is seldom defined explicitly, the following properties are generally considered in the generative literature to be part of the V2 character of OFr.