Verb movement and the subject position in Yiddish

摘要

This paper presents an account of verb movement in Yiddish. Like German, Yiddish exhibits the verb-second phenomenon (V2); but unlike German, Yiddish shows V2 effects in both main and embedded clauses. I argue that in Yiddish the finite verb moves to Infl rather than to Comp, as has generally been proposed for German. As a consequence of V → I movement, Spec, IP (the “topic” position) is specified to function as either an A or A-bar position in Yiddish. This yields a natural way of distinguishing subject and non-subject topics. Finally, Yiddish is shown to have a second type of verb movement which exists independently of V2. This instance of verb movement is V → Comp, and shows the same main/embedded symmetry as V → Comp