Projective meaning and the licensing of Embedded Root Phenomena

The paper discusses the occurrence and the licensing factors of Embedded Root Phenomena in German and in English. Mostly, embedded V2 in German and embedded topicalization in English occur in the same contexts, however, there are also differences which suggest different licensing conditions. I will show that embedded V2 in German is excluded from all clauses that project under the scope of an entailment-cancelling operator and that cannot be denied directly. In line with Beaver et al. (2010), both properties were assumed to be characteristic features of content that is not-at-issue. Therefore, I will conclude that embedded V2 is only licensed in clauses that express at-issue content.