V(>)2 in de declaratieve hoofdzin in de Frans-Vlaamse dialecten

This article reports on the position of the finite verb in declarative main clauses in French Flemish, a group of dialects which belong to the West Flemish dialect group, but which are overarched by Standard French. We transcribed recordings of 52 different locations in Northern France. In this article, we present the first general results on the linear position of the finite verb in French Flemish in the corpus, following the generative tradition, by giving quantitative results and representative examples. We especially focus on the common V2 violations in French Flemish, in which the verb takes the third place or more (V>2) in the declarative main clause. We discuss the main properties of those violations and how they set them apart from the other coastal Dutch dialects. In order to do that, we focus on the different nature of the language, which is on the one hand very archaic, but on the other hand in certain aspects new and unique.