Re: Do Children Learn Languages at Different Rates?

Am Wed, 11 Jan 2006 23:18:27 GMT schrieb Peter T. Daniels:

> Joachim Pense wrote:
>>
>> Am Wed, 11 Jan 2006 13:14:11 GMT schrieb Peter T. Daniels:
>
>>>>> These are just examples of how rigidly German is actually a V2 language
>>>>> (the verb has to come second, and it doesn't really care what it is that
>>>>> comes first). I've been waiting quite a while in this thread to mention
>>>>> that!
>>>>
>>>> I don't think that V2 is the point. Syntactically, it could as well have
>>>> been
>>>> "Birnen gefallen dem König"
>>>> and
>>>> "Das scheint mir richtig".
>>>
>>> And _where_ is the verb? In second position.
>>>
>>
>> Of course it is.
>
> Because German is rigidly V2.
>
>>>> It would even be the standard word order.
>>>
>>> If it weren't the standard order, it wouldn't be much of a useful
>>> typological observation, would it?
>>>
>>
>> The standard WO doesn't have the object before the subject. But in this
>> case the inverted form "Dem König gefallen Birnen" (the king<dat> please
>> pears) is more common.
>
> Where did I say anything about S or O? It's V2.
>

You said something about V2, replying to a posting by me that was about S
and O, and not at all about V2.

>>>> But at least the first of the two
>>>> examples sounds improbable in SVO order.
>>>>
>>>> The reason is pragmatics: Birnen / Mir are the sentence _themes_, which are
>>>> often denoted by fronting. And the reason that "Birnen gefallen dem König"
>>>> sounds improbable is that the definite king is more likely to be the
>>>> sentence theme than the indefinite pears.
>>>>
>>>> But there are examples for the V2 strictness:
>>>>
>>>> Es fällt der Regen.
>>>>
>>>> "It falls the rain".
>>>>
>>>> ('the rain is falling')
>>>>
>>>> Verb fronting does exist in German, but to front a verb, we have to move
>>>> _back_ everything that came before the verb and replace it by a dummy "Es"
>>>> which does not seem to have a real syntactical function except being a
>>>> placeholder for the first position. (This is a different "Es" than the one
>>>> in "Es regnet" 'it is raining', which is formally a subject).
>>>
>>> In order to keep the verb in second position. Duh.
>>
>> As I say.
>>
>>>
>>>> I sometimes try to front a verb in English, but fail in most cases. How is
>>>> it done? If I wanted to front the verb in "the rain is falling", what comes
>>>> to my mind is "There falls the rain", but it does not seem to work with the
>>>> continuous form, and the "There" seems to suggest a local/demonstrative
>>>> meaning I don't want to express.
>>>
>>> A well-known poem begins "Still falls the rain."
>>
>> So does that mean English has someting like V2 as well? In the form that in
>> marked speech, you cannot move the verb to a sentence-position before the
>> second?
>
> No. German is quite rigidly V2 (not V3, for instance). English isn't.

So you can front a verb in English?

Joachim
.

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