出版社：Japan Science and Technology Information Aggregator, Electronic
摘要：This paper investigates the relevance of verbal inflection to the verb second (V2) phenomenon in the history of English. Focusing on the close connection of V2 with the presence of a distinctive number agreement morpheme on verbs, I claim that in early English, the person and number features are located on the categories Fin and low-Top, respectively, in the fine CP structure advocated by Rizzi (1997), and that the finite verb raises to Fin. Under the proposed mechanism, the loss of V2 in English is considered a natural consequence of the decline of verbal inflection, which forces the person and number features to be jointly carried by Fin, and the finite verb to raise no higher than to T.
