The Rich Agreement Hypothesis and the Loss of Verb Second in English

Abstract

There is a good deal of discussion about the relevance of verbal morphology to V-to-I movement. The assumption that rich inflection triggers overt verb movement to Infl may be called the Rich Agreement Hypothesis (RAH) (cf. Bobaljik 2001). The diachronic corollary of the RAH is that the loss of rich inflection leads to the loss of V-to-I movement, and some specific proposals are made as to exactly how to define “rich” inflection.
However, few serious att e mpts have so far been made to apply this hypothesis to Verb Second (V2) phenomena. A major reason for this is that apparently rich inflection is not a necessary condition for V2 movement; thus, Mainland Scandinavian languages (i.e., Danish, Swedish and Norwegian) exhibit overt V2 movement in main clauses despite their flat verbal morphology.
The fact about Mainl a nd Scandinavians at first glance seems to constitute a crucial evidence against the RAH on V2 movement. This paper will nevertheless show that the loss of V2 in English is closely linked to the decline of verbal inflection from Middle English (ME) to early Modern English and thus can be explained by the RAH. Consequently, I will suggest that there are two types of V2 that occur in different components of the grammar, that is, PF and the syntax.