Describing Yiddish word order using topological fields

In this paper, the notion of ‘topological fields ’ will be explored to give an account of Yiddish word order. I will show why the use of such a notion seems appealing for the description of the Yiddish word order phenomena and I will explore Yiddish data to define which topological fields are needed. The notion of topological fields was introduced by the Germanic grammatical tradition (Drach (1937), Diderichsen (1966) among others). It allows a description of constituent order in terms of po-sition within the clause instead of using syntactic relations. Indeed, in the Germanic languages, con-stituents are ordered as a function of the places they may occupy in the clause. For example, one of the word order phenomena characterising these languages is the so-called V2 phenomenon: the finite verb is placed in frontal position (first or second) in matrix-clauses. The first position, if occupied, is not restricted to a special constituent: any topicalised constituent may be placed in this position on condition that there is only one constituent. It thus seems more efficient and economic to describe this phenomenon by saying that these languages have a clause pattern with a specific field reserved for the inflected verb rather than using linear precedence. Yiddish also shows word order phenomena characteristic of the Germanic languages: i) it exhib-its the V2 phenomenon, ii) the order of constituents is partially free (Scrambling: Ross (1967)). It thu