V3 in urban youth varieties of Dutch

In this paper we compare new data from Dutch urban youth varieties to emerging varieties in other Germanic languages like German and Norwegian. We argue that, unlike previously thought, V3 word orders can be found in urban youth varieties of Dutch as well and present data from our new corpus. The V3 patterns in our dataset share most characteristics of the optional V3 innovations observed in other Germanic urban youth varieties: the sentence-initial constituent is a frame-setter of any category and the preverbal constituent is mainly the subject that functions as a familiar topic. We adopt Walkden’s (2017) analysis and extend it by adding an additional FrameP so that preverbal constituents that do not function as familiar topics could be accounted for as well. Following Wolfe’s cline of possible V2-languages, we argue that the Dutch urban youth varieties can best be analysed as “Force-V2 system 1” grammars with V-to-Force movement + an additional FrameP. They thus differ from Standard Dutch, which is argued to be a “Force-V2 system 2” based on the fact that only hanging or left-dislocated topics can be found in sentence-initial position of superficial V3 patterns. This data thus presents an interesting case of syntactic change in the opposite direction: from strict V2 to V2 with optional V3 orders