The XP-þá-construction and V2

This paper discusses a relatively unexplored construction in Icelandic that displays linear V3/V4 and I will refer to as the XP-þá-construction. In this construction, a left-peripheral adjunct is followed by adverbial þá ‘then’ before the finite verb. The complementizer að ‘that’ can occur between the adjunct and þá, an important fact that distinguishes the XP-þá-construction from the superficially similar så-construction in Norwegian and Swedish (Eide 2011; Holmberg 2018). It will be argued that þá spells out the trace of the moved adjunct, following Grohmann‘s (2003) analysis of Copy Left Dislocation in German. This analysis entails that only one phrasal category moves to left periphery in the XP-þá-construction, as required by the Bottleneck Hypothesis (Haegeman 1996; Roberts 2004). The proposed analysis is also consistent with the view that the V2 constraint is satisfied in FinP, the lowest projection in the left periphery.