Diachronic Development in Isolation: The Loss of V2 Phenomena in Cimbrian

This paper deals with the syntactic development of Cimbrian, a German dialect, which was spoken for centuries in some enclaves in northern Italy. In particular, we argue that the ‘dismantlement’ of the V2 phenomenon is connected with a change concerning the ‘nature’ of specific word order patterns: from ‘allowed’ V2 exceptions to ‘unmarked’ and frequent constructions, i.e., from hanging topic (freies Thema) in WH clause to ‘new’ left dislocation modalities, which finally bring to the generalized loss of the V2 in the declarative clause.