Verb Second by Underspecif ication

The paper presents an HPSG analysis of Verb Second (V2) in German by underspeciication, making use of a categorial type hierarchy. We begin by discussing some shortcomings of the HPSG analysis of V2 by lexical rule in Kiss/Wesche(1991), which can be remedied by integration of the concept of functional categories, originally introduced in HPSG by Netter(1994). Based on these insights, and largely inspired by the GB analysis of Haider(1993), we develop an alternative analysis of V2 in HPSG, which is based on the concept of underspeciication. The nite verb is represented in the lexicon as an abstract category type which is underspeciied for functional and complementation properties. In conjunction with the type hierarchy, these properties get appropriately deened depending on the actual syntactic context the verb appears in. We end up with an analysis of the V2 dependency relation which restricts the information structure shared by antecedent and trace to (enriched) HEAD attributes, as opposed to LOCAL attributes for phrasal constituents. This accounts for the locality of the V2 dependency. The analysis by underspeciication makes interesting predictions for the interdependence of syntactic and semantic properties. This is most transparent for the ungrammaticality of V2 in embedded wh-clauses.