The term “residual Verb Second ” is a misnomer for English, because V2 is, in fact, still productive in the language. Evidence for this comes from a previously undescribed negative inversion phenomenon innovated very recently in varieties of English. An analysis is proposed for how such a restrictive V2 system could, nevertheless, be productive, appealing to learner-driven models of language change in which novel structures can arise as artefacts of the acquisition procedure. Specifically, it is argued that innovative V2 arises when acquirers postulate a novel clause type characterized by a left-edge operator, which they analyse as a V2 environment by analogy with other non-declarative clause types involving such structures (e.g. interrogatives). This finds support from other cases of innovative V2 in English, Scots, and Afrikaans. Overall, we are left with a clearer picture of the status of V2 in English, and what it takes to innovate new V2 environments cross-linguistically.