Chapter 5

Optional V2 in modern Afrikaans

This chapter investigates an embedded V2 option that features prominently in modern spoken Afrikaans, while being either completely barred or heavily restricted in other V2 languages: embedded wh-V2. This option, which is available in all wh-complements, freely alternates with its prescriptively correct V-final counterpart, and does not, as in colloquial varieties of English, bear the illocutionary force of a “true question”. To capture these peculiar distributional and interpretive facts, I propose a novel link to a further distinctive property of modern Afrikaans: its negative concord requirement. Appealing to the plausible origins of the obligatory clause-final nie-concord element as a discourse tag-element that would initially have been adjoined to CP, I argue that its prescriptively imposed obligatory integration into the clausal spine produced a new CP-peripheral projection, Pol(arity)P(hrase). Acquirers’ predilection to generalize the structures in their grammars led to PolP’s generalization to all clause-types, making modern-day Afrikaans clauses consistently “bigger” than those of its (West) Germanic counterparts. If McCloskey (2006) is correct in assuming that selected/complement Cs bar raised verbs – the so-called Kayne-Rizzi-Roberts effect – the presence of this extra, “insulating” layer will account for the consistent possibility of V2-creating V-to-C movement in all Afrikaans clausal complements, and not just those that permit this option in Germanic languages more generally.