This study examines the diachronic development of six morphological and syntactic features in Norwegian dialects, aiming to determine whether the persistence of a dialectal feature is more influenced by its status as an archaism or innovation, or by its sociolinguistic function. The analysis utilizes two corpora comprising a total of 5.5 million words of non-standard Norwegian recorded between 1937 and 2015. Among the six features examined, three are inherited from Old Norse/Middle Norwegian (dative forms, embedded V2, preproprial articles), while the other three are more recent innovations (the use of an originally oblique pronominal form in subject position, the use of the secondary pronominal form vårs ‘us’ instead of oss ‘us’ in object position, and the extended use of definiteness). The findings suggest that the identificational function of a dialect feature plays a more crucial role in its persistence than the age of the feature. This conclusion aligns with Trudgill (1986) and Sandøy (1996), both of whom underscore the significance of identificational language features.
This article gives an overview of the word order patterns found in the Nordic Word Order Database (NWD), providing maps that illustrate variation in argument placement and verb placement across the North Germanic languages. All investigated phenomena show variable word order in at least one of the languages, and categorical word order in other languages, considering at least one of the investigated variables. Apart from the differences between the languages, the data in NWD reveal little regional variation (apart from non-V2 in questions and particle-subject order in regional Norwegian). Instead, variation found within languages is very often within speaker variation. Different speakers can have different preferences, but the preferences are not geographically determined.
This paper gives an overview of the results from three data collection sessions that took place in Norway in 2018, which specifically targeted the placement of subjects, objects and particles in main clauses. The results reveal a fairly high amount of variation in the relative linear order of phrasal subjects and negation, and phrasal objects and verb particles, while the placement of pronouns show little or no variation. We view these results in a wider context of variation within the North Germanic languages, and furthermore explicitly describe the structure of the collected data, and how to access it in the online Nordic Word Order Database.
This paper gives an overview of the Danish data on argument placement in the Nordic Word Order Database (NWD, Lundquist et al. 2019). The data were collected from 28 speakers in Copenhagen and Fredriksværk in 2018. The experimental task elicited subject and object placement relative to adverbs and particles (i.e., subject shift, object shift and particle shift), as well as subject placement relative to objects (long object shift). The results confirm that there is considerably less variability in argument placement in Danish than in the other North Germanic languages.
This article gives a summary of the Swedish and Danish data on verb placement in the Nordic Word order Database (NWD; Lundquist et al. 2019). The data were collected using an elicited production paradigm. I discuss variation in verb placement in Danish in four constructions: in embedded clauses with respect to adverbs (embedded V2), in main clauses with respect to preverbal and sentence-medial adverbs, and in embedded and main clause wh-questions. The Swedish data cover embedded clauses only. The Swedish and Danish results are discussed in direct comparison to the verb placement patterns observed in the other North Germanic languages covered in the NWD.
Norwegian has verb second (V2) word order in main but not embedded clauses. Although as a first approximation V2 is a phenomenon characteristic of root clauses, it has long been known that it occurs also in a restricted set of embedded clauses in Norwegian, as in many, if not all, of the other North Germanic languages. Many Norwegian dialects in addition allow deviations from the standard V2 word order in main clause interrogatives. Hence, the asymmetric verb second pattern seems to break down in different ways in Norwegian. This study presents new data from a large-scale elicited production experiment targeting the placement of the finite verb in both main and embedded clauses in Norwegian. The distribution of deviations from the standard word order pattern, and the constraints on the environments where these are produced, will be of primary concern. While classic accounts of verb second analyse it as involving a macro-parameter, I will argue based on the collected production data that it is necessarily decomposed in several ways, with variation in both main and embedded clauses guided by clause type, assertion, and specific lexical items.
This article gives a summary of the Faroese data concerning argument placement in the Nordic Word order Database (NWD). Special emphasis is put on carefully describing the different conditions tested in the argument placement experiment, the experimental set-up, and the demographic information of the participants. An overview of relevant parts of Faroese grammar is also given, as well as a summary of the word order patterns found in the Faroese data present in the database. Finally, we discuss how the data in the database provides new insights to the grammar of Faroese, and how the data patterns in Faroese differ from the patterns observed in the other North Germanic languages.
In this article, I present data from the Nordic Word order Database (NWD) on word order in Faroese embedded clauses. I discuss the methods used in the data elicitation, data analysis, and present a first overview of the patterns in the dataset. The NWD contains a total of 4,752 embedded clauses elicited from 33 native Faroese speakers, focussing on embedded wh-questions, and the placement of the finite verb with respect to adverbs in different types of complements. The results from the Faroese fieldwork largely confirm the word order patterns discussed in the literature. There is very little variation in the word order of embeddded wh-questions in the NWD-data. Verb > Adverb order is most common in declarative bridge-verb complements, whereas non-bridge, and wh-complements disfavour this order.
In this article, we present the Nordic Word Order Database (NWD), with a focus on the rationale behind it, the methods used in data elicitation, data analysis and the empirical scope of the database. NWD is an online database with a user-friendly search interface, hosted by The Text Laboratory at the University of Oslo, launched in April 2019 (https://tekstlab.uio.no/nwd). It contains elicited production data from speakers of all of the North Germanic languages, including several different dialects. So far, 7 fieldtrips have been conducted, and data from altogether around 250 participants (age 16–60) have been collected (approx. 55 000 sentences in total). The data elicitation is carried out through a carefully controlled production experiment that targets core syntactic phenomena that are known to show variation within and/or between the North Germanic languages, e.g., subject placement, object placement, particle placement and verb placement. In this article, we present the motivations and research questions behind the database, as well as a description of the experiment, the data collection procedure, and the structure of the database
Measureless exclamatives convey a surprise over a presupposed large quantity of the kind of object denoted by the noun in the fronted wh-phrase, and they do so despite the fact that there is no overt quantifier in the phrase (compare gloss and translation). The construction is known from English and has for instance been recently discussed in Rett (2008: 148ff). The wh-item used in this construction is the one that is otherwise used in queries for objects, i.e. the item corresponding to the pronominal use of English what.
The Scandinavian languages are generally verb second (V2) languages with the finite verb in the second position. However, there are certain exceptions to the V2 rule, and one of these involve main clauses with the adverb maybe in a clause-initial position. In such clauses, V2 tends to be optional (cf. among others Faarlund et al. 1997 and Westergaard 2009 for Norwegian, Platzack 1986, 1998, Teleman et al. 1999 and Andreasson 2002 for Swedish, Rognvaldsson and Thrainsson 1990 for Icelandic and Thrainsson et al. 2004 for Faroese). This optionality is illustrated here with a Norwegian example (from Faarlund et al. 1997:814, my translations):
Imperative clauses in the Nordic languages typically display V1 word order. The referential subject is normally absent, with the exception of Icelandic, where it is normally overt (Einarsson 1967:159, Thrainsson 2007:6). According to Thrainsson (2007:6), the imperative verb is followed by a reduced from of the second person pronoun, except in very formal style, where the pronoun can be absent, or pronounced in its full form. Based on examples found in the reference grammars and some other sources, negative adverbs may appear either after the finite verb, as is typical in Swedish (Teleman et al. 1999), see (1), and Danish (Heltof & Hansen 2011), see (2), or it can either follow or precede the verb, as in Norwegian (Faarlund et al. 1997), see (3).
Av, which historically is a continuation of the Old Scandinavian preposition af (Bjorvand & Lindeman 2007:64), also has a number of other uses in Norwegian, as seen e.g. in the entries for av in Beito et al. (1966) and Guttu et al. (1977). Some of these uses, all attested in the Nordic Dialect Corpus, are shown in (2)–(6). In (2), we see the ablative use of av, whereas it marks cause in (3), material in (4), the whole in a part-whole relation in (5), and the agent of a passive in (6).
The Nordic languages differ with respect to word order in infinitives under causative lade ‘let’ (and cognates), in cases where the agent of the embedded verb is unspecified (see e.g. Taraldsen 1984, Platzack 1986a, Thráinsson 2007:454 and Wood 2011). In Icelandic and Standard Swedish, an object DP must follow the embedded verb, while in Danish it must precede the verb; cf. (1) and (2). Faroese and Norwegian allow both orders (see Thráinsson et al. 2004:313 n. and Faarlund et al. 1997:1009). According to Hulthén (1944:127), VO is the normal order in Bokmål, and Faarlund et al. (1997:1009) states that the OV-order is used in literary style.
As described in Endresen (1985) and Bull (1987) Norwegian dialects in Trondelag and North Norway have a way of forming degree questions without the use of a wh-expression and without the syntax that normally accompanies wh-questions. Taken at face value the construction takes the form of regular yes/no-questions. Consider the pair in (1) showing a Standard Norwegian degree question (1a) compared to the Trondelag/North Norwegian construction (1b).
