"Residual Verb‑Second as an Edge‑Feature Phenomenon: Negative‑Adverbial vs. Locative Inversion in Present‑Day English"
This paper investigates two residual verb-second (V2) constructions in Present-Day English—Negative-Adverbial Inversion (e.g., Rarely did she complain) and Locative Inversion (e.g., Into the room burst John). It argues that both are synchronically productive and governed by structural constraints, not stylistic preference or historical residue. Drawing on native speaker judgments, corpus data, and syntactic diagnostics, the analysis shows that these constructions involve movement of the finite verb to Fin°, triggered by the valuation of an edge feature in the left periphery. The paper proposes that this movement occurs only when a clause-initial specifier bears specific information-structural features: [+Neg +Focus] for NAI and [+Stage-Topic] for LI. The findings support a minimalist, feature-driven account of residual V2 and challenge views that treat such constructions as fossilized or marginal.