Residual V-to-I in Faroese and its lack in Danish: detecting the final stages of a syntactic change

In Heycock et al. (2010a) it was shown that V-to-I in contemporary Faroese has much lower acceptability than might be expected from a number of descriptions in the literature. Given that it was also argued that Faroese has a relatively free distribution of embedded V2 (EV2), it might be concluded that all putative instances of V-to-I in the language can be attributable to EV2. Here we demonstrate, however, that the judgments on clear cases of EV2 and on possible cases of V-to-I differ subtly but measurably, showing that the loss of V-to-I in this language has not yet gone entirely to completion. We further demonstrate that the situation in Faroese contrasts with
that in Danish, as expected under the assumption that V-Neg orders in subordinate clauses in Danish are entirely attributable to EV2, as argued in e.g. Vikner (1995).