Traces of History, 2019

Historical linguistics has traditionally focused either on a synchronic description of a language during a certain period, or it has focused on changes that have taken place. This project aims at turning the perspective 180 degrees, and ask the following question: What characterizes structures that do not change? From a typological point of view, V2 is extremely rare and is only found in a few, dispersed languages outside the Germanic group. On the other hand, one know that a number of Romance languages were V2 in the medieval period. Since the Middle Ages, V2 has been lost in all Romance languages with the exception of Rhaeto-Romance, whereas it has been retained in all Germanic languages with the exception of Modern English. This gives the project the opportunity to use Modern English and Modern Rhaeto-Romance as a control group. When one define what the Germanic and Medieval Romance languages have in common, one must compare that to data from English and Rhaeto-Romance. Seven researchers and one PhD student will cooperate in investigating core questions related to V2. The project tried to identify features that are linked to V2 and see to what extent V2 hinges on the presence of these. On the other hand, the project also wanted to see what elements of the old V2 grammar might be found as relics in the modern SV-languages. The project have identified a set of hypotheses that will be at the center of the work. The main hypotheses are the following: - In order for V2 to be preserved, certain other key aspects of the language must be present. - V2 is shorthand for two different movement operations, and it is possible for a language to lose one or both properties.