What was the broad question that you most wanted to get an answer to during your time in the program?

One question that I have always wanted to answer is the nature of verb-second (V2) phenomena. My interest was triggered by the fact that Karitiana, the Amerindian language I have worked on during my MA and PhD, displays V2 phenomena in declarative sentences. When I entered MIT, the literature on German, Dutch and Frisian V2 explained the complementary distribution between the position of the verb in main (VO) and embedded clauses (OV) as following from verb movement in finite clauses from a basic OV position (through an Infl-final position) to an empty sentence-initial C position; this movement was followed by an obligatory movement of a constituent to the Specifier of C. Karitiana shares exactly the same features with those Germanic languages, except that the constituent movement is not obligatory, but preferred.

What is the current status of this question? Has it been answered? Did it turn out to be an ill-conceived question? If it’s a meaningful question as yet unanswered, please tell us what you think the replica watch path to an answer might be, or what obstacles make it a hard question.

The question about the nature of V2 is a hard one to tackle. The literature on embedded V2 in mainland Scandinavian and Frisian, especially that which tried to account for the co-occurrence of embedded V2 and C, has generated the need to discuss CP recursion. An alternative to the CP recursion analysis put forth to explain embedded V2 in Icelandic and Yiddish is that the embedded V2 clauses have movement of the finite V to I but not to C. Research in Karitiana supports the latter hypothesis, in that it indicates that embedded clauses in the language are VPs dominated by aspectual and/or auxiliary head-final projections to which the verb moves, but not by head-initial CPs. The Karitiana data seems to suggest that the complementary distribution found in V2 languages does not have anything to do with the presence or absence of Cs per se, but with the syntactic, semantic and pragmatic differences between main and embedded clauses. If it is true that illocutionary force cannot be expressed in embedded environments, this is an area in which more research is required. The semantics and pragmatics of embedded root phenomena and non-finite clauses are some crucial phenomena we need to understand better as a field before we even try to account for V2.

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