Cross Linguistic Variation in the Realm of Support Verbs

In this paper I investigate a particular case of cross-Germanic variation, namely a number of syntactic differences with respect to VP Topicalization, VP Ellipsis and VP Pronomi-nalization. Swedish and English turn out to be the two extremes, with Danish and Norwegaian in between; Icelandic is like Swedish, but lacks the possibility to topicalize VP.
Arguments are given for the analysis that the support verb is a spelled-out little v, and that VP Topicalization is a fronting of a √P. With respect to tense, there are two options for the root: it may lack tense features, or it may have an uninterpretable but valued tense feature; lit-tle v always has an uninterpretable but valued tense featur. The first option is chosen by Eng-lish, Danish and Norwegian, which among other things has the consequence that the fronted root phrase has a non-finite verb, and that these languages accept VP Ellipsis. The second op-tion is chosen by all the Scandinavian languages, Danish, Icelandic, Norwegian and Swedish, and is compatible with VP Topicalization with a tensed verb in the fronted part, no VP Ellip-sis but VP Pronominalization.