New article on Yiddish published

My article on the history of Yiddish, “On Slavic-influenced Syntactic Changes in Yiddish: A Parametric Account” has been published in the proceedings of FASL24 (the NYU meeting):

Pereltsvaig, Asya (2017) On Slavic-influenced Syntactic Changes in Yiddish: A Parametric Account. In: Yohei Oseki, Mashe Esipova, Stephanie Harves (eds.) Annual Workshop on Formal Approaches to Slavic Linguistics. The NYU Meeting 2015. Ann Arbor, MI: Michigan Slavic Publications. Pp. 281-300.

Introduction:

Slavic influence on the phonology, morphology, and lexicon of Yiddish is well-documented (Weinreich 1980, inter alia). In contrast, syntactic innovations triggered by contact with Slavic languages are rarely investigated. This paper examines the extension of verb-second (V2) from root clauses to embedded clauses, which was suggested to be Slavic-influenced by Weinreich (1958) and Santorini (1989, 1992). However, no satisfactory explanation has been offered in the previous literature for how Slavic languages—which lack V2 in either root or embedded clauses—could have engendered such a change in Yiddish. The key to the proposed analysis is treating (embedded) V2 not as a unitary phenomenon, but as a “constellation” of parameter values, some of which were already in place in Yiddish before Slavic languages came into the picture and the rest of which changed under the influence of Slavic.