Research on non-native pronoun resolution has predominantly been concerned with (i) ‘ordinary’ 3rd person pronouns/anaphors like En. "he", "she", "they" or "himself", "herself", "themselves", (ii) language pairs involving English as the native (L1) or the foreign (L2) language, and (iii) the role that binding constraints and syntactic structure in general play in L2 versus L1 processing. The present paper – a follow-up study to Pitz et al. (2017) – deviates from this trend in all three respects: We investigate how L1-Norwegian learners of L2-German interpret the two German possessive pronouns/determiners "sein" (≈ his) and "ihr" (≈ her or their), arguing that lexical divergence between the possessive systems, and in particular the formal similarity between binding-neutral L2-German "sein" and the L1-Norwegian reflexive possessive "sin", may enhance or interfere with L2 comprehension, depending on the structural conditions. In Section 2 we briefly present the two possessive systems. Section 3 summarizes relevant research on pronoun resolution, with a special view to possessives. Sections 4–6 present a pilot study on L1-Norwegian learners’ grammaticality judgments of "sein" and "ihr" in simple sentences (Sect. 5) and a forced-choice resolution experiment involving a group of L1-Norwegian learners with a background two or three years’ teaching of L2-German at high-school level and a control group of native speakers of German (Sect. 6). The final Section 7 provides a summary and concluding discussion of our findings.
Dans les langues romanes et germaniques, le procédé de topicalisation consiste à déplacer en début de phrase un constituent pour lui conférér une interprétation précise, à savoir celle d’un topique/thème. Au-delà de cette caracteristique partagée, les deux groupes de langues se distinguent par deux aspects purement formels : les langues romanes ont recours à un élément de reprise sans autre changement dans l’ordre des mots, tandis que les langues germaniques V2, de façon inverse, emploient l’inversion sujet-verbe sans élément de reprise. Dans cet article, je compare la topicalisation en français et norvégien standards. En m’appuiant sur la théorie des phases (Chomsky, 2000), je propose que le type de topicalisation (avec vs. sans reprise) et le mouvement du verbe (T0 vs. C0) sont étroitement liés. L’hypothèse présentée est que la périphérie gauche d’une langue V2 et celle d’une langue non V2 sont différentes, et que le facteur décisif est le statut phasal ou non de la tête Fin0.
In this article, dialect changes and variation among young schoolchildren in the island of Sandoy in the Faroe Islands are discussed. The fieldwork was made by a group of students at the University of the Faroe Islands in November 2019 under the guidance of this article’s author. The informants are two groups of 10 and 15 year old schoolchildren. By examining the young generation, we can get information about the ‘state of health’ of the dialect. Here three dialectal variables are examined: (i) The variation of definite and indefinite form of words for family members, for instance the dialectal form mamman ‘the mother’ and the Central Faroese form mamma ‘mother’; (ii) Personal and possessive pronouns in 1st and 2nd person plural in oblique case, for instance the dialect form [o:gʊn] ‘us’ and the Central Faroese form [ɔʰk:ʊn] ‘us’; (iii) The pronunciation of short ó with the dialectal variant [ɔ] and the Central Faroese form [œ], for instance [fɔlk] resp. [fœlk] ‘people’. The first variable shows clearly a tendency towards dialect change in the young generation: the indefinite forms are much more frequent than the dialect counterpart. The use of the pronouns shows a relatively high degree of variation: the dialect forms are more frequently used by the 10 than the 15 year old pupils. The pronunciation of short ó shows variation to a large extent. Here we see the same pattern as we saw for variable 2: the youngest pupils are more likely to use the dialect¬al form [ɔ] than the older ones. On the other hand, variation is much more common in the group of 15 year old pupils. This study shows both stability and change in the dialect of children in Sandoy: Stability in use of the dialectal forms of the personal and possessive pro¬nouns, and variation and change in the two other variables. In a couple of years an underwater tunnel will connect the island of Sandoy with the central part of the islands. In a future scenario this dialect study opens the possibility for comparative studies of the dialect of Sandoy before and after the opening of the tunnel.
This paper discusses Object Inversion in Icelandic syntax, i.e. examples where the direct object precedes the indirect object (DO-IO orders) in active clauses. In contrast to the neutral IO-DO order, Object Inversion is incredibly rare with most ditransitive verbs and more or less restricted to ditransitive verbs in the DAT-ACC class. This is shown by extensive searches in the new Risamálheild Corpus. These searches also show that Object Inversion strongly favors examples where the DO encodes old information and is phonologically lighter than the following IO. These results yield new and important insights into the study of Object Inversion but also confirm earlier claims in the literature.
This paper presents first findings from an offline study of Czech native speakers’ use and interpretation of reflexive and non-reflexive possessive pronouns. The study is part of a larger possessive project outlined by Fabricius-Hansen et al. (2017), leaning on the comprehension experiment presented in Pitz et al. (2017). The study encompasses questionnaire data collected from 259 informants who were tested under four different conditions on two competing pronouns: the reflexive possessive (svůj) and the 3rd person non-reflexive possessive (jeho). The results revealed that Czech native speakers show a strong uncertainty when interpreting constructions with a cataphoric non-reflexive possessive. This shows that even for native speakers, the establishment of the anaphoric and cataphoric relations under certain syntactic conditions is a challenging and highly complex task. With these results, several hypotheses are formulated in various target-source-language pairs concerning the processing of reflexive and non-reflexive possessives in L2.
Med utgangspunkt i et klimaperspektiv undersøker vi i denne artikkelen hvordan nordmenn uttrykker sine meninger om og sitt forhold til den fysiske naturen. Med et materiale i hovedsak hentet fra representative spørreundersøkelser, bestående av svar på åpne spørsmål, stiller vi to spørsmål: 1) hvilken rolle tillegges natur og menneske som årsak til klimaendringer, og 2) hvilken plass har naturen i folks liv og levemåte som et argument for livsstilsendringer. Teoretisk plasserer analysene seg innenfor lingvistiskpolyfoni og leksikalsk semantikk. Studien belyser den betydelige kompleksiteten i klimaspørsmålet og peker på de mange spørsmål og valg knyttet til forholdet menneske-natur som deltakerne i vårt demokratiske samfunn må ta stilling til.
In this article we show how the search interface Glossa has been developed in step with the various corpora that have been built at the Text Laboratory. Furthermore, we present statistics on what kind of searches people do – single words or longer phrases, with or without specifications for phonetic form or grammatical features etc. – focusing on the Nordic Dialect Corpus and the Corpus of American Nordic Speech. Finally, we demonstrate how researchers have searched for data in these corpora and used them in published articles – both simple and extended search, in smaller or larger language areas – within several different branches of linguistics.
Productive compounding contributes a lot to neology in Norwegian. This study investigates the use of new compounds with corona- or korona- occuring in online news articles in early 2020 when the coronavirus pandemic developed. Material from the Norwegian Newspaper Corpus was used in a quantitative analysis on a timeline. The vocabulary found to increase continually and strongly during several months, and the proportion of word types to tokens indicates a broadening of themes. After barely half a month the spelling changed from only corona- to mostly korona-.
The paradigm of possessive determiners differs in systematic ways across languages and causes cognitive resolution problems in the interpretation of a foreign language. Based on previous investigations into cross-linguistic influences (CLI) in learners’ interpretation of possessive determiners, this article presents the design of an experiment for testing English, German and Norwegian adult learners of French. We specify two kinds of processing problems: a direction problem (orientation towards possessor vs. possessee) and a problem of lexical parasites (‘false friends’). The experiment is directed at learners’ spontaneous interpretation of the singular possessives "son", "sa" and "ses", on account of a partly false friendship with the possessive determiners in these learners’ first languages.
Le point de départ de ce travail est le constat que le français ancien, qui contient des constructions à verbe en seconde position avec sujet postposé comme c’est par exemple le cas en norvégien, a également des sujets postposés à un verbe précédé d’un coordonnant, structure inexistante en norvégien. La construction à inversion du sujet avec coordonnant initial en français ancien est réévaluée ici. Cette construction a tendance à être analysée par les études existantes comme étant une coordination d’un verbe en position syntaxiquement basse suivie du sujet in situ, et non pas comme une structure à verbe second avec le verbe en position haute. L’analyse est fondée sur l’absence de postposition de sujets clitiques dans les données analysées. Ces données sont cependant essentiellement littéraires, et au regard de l’attestation de sujets clitiques dans d’autres langues romanes comme l’italien, des données alternatives du français sont examinées. Ces données confirment que la construction ne relève pas du verbe en seconde position, parce que le verbe ne figure pas en position syntaxique haute. Elle illustre plutôt une coordination asymétrique, ce qui est courant dans l’ancienne langue, expliquant les divergences d’avec le norvégien et le français actuel.
La langue orale se caractérise par une multitude de pratiques. Elle ne dispose pas, comme le fait la langue écrite, d’une norme stable et objective ; la variété légitime repose sur des normes subjectives reflétant les usages de groupes socialement dominants. Dans le présent article nous nous interrogeons sur la place de la variation dans l’enseignement de la prononciation dans un contexte de français langue étrangère.
Le présent article consiste en une étude de la construction détachée en français au prisme de sa traduction en norvégien par des apprenants de niveau B1. Plus précisément, nous nous pencherons sur les cas de syntagmes adjectivaux et participiaux en constructions détachées. En inscrivant leur description théorique dans le cadre formel de Combettes (1998, 2005), nous nous attarderons sur deux aspects de ces structures – le repérage référentiel et la relation sémantique – autant de potentiels défis à la compréhension de l’apprenant. Une enquête établie en deux temps (tests 1 et 2) constituera ensuite l’empirie de nos analyses. Dans une démarche de recherche-action, à partir des descriptions théoriques fournies, nous dresserons un inventaire des écueils syntaxiques et sémantiques sur lesquels se heurtent les étudiants dans leurs traductions. Ce répertoriage mettra en exergue les différences d’emplois fondamentales entre le norvégien et le français et nous guidera vers une conclusion contrastive didactique à l’intention des apprenants.
In this paper I will show that it is possible to extract elements from an embedded root clause in a V2 language, provided that the deleted copy is spelled out in a high position. However, if the embedded clause does not have V0-to-C0 movement, no deleted copy can be spelled out. This difference falls out naturally from the assumption that embedded root clauses must be thematically complete and that in the case of movement chains, the foot of the chain cannot be spelled out. This paper is a detailed study of extraction strategies in Norwegian, based on a corpus of 1329 informants. Its novelty lies in combining the study of extraction strategies with the presence of resumptive elements in the embedded clause.
Among the syntactic changes that can be observed in the transition from Old Norwegian to Modern Norwegian are the following word order changes: loss of OV order, object shift from a VP containing a verb (non-finite verb or any verb in a subordinate clause), preverbal preposition, and topicalization of a bare head. The fact that these changes all seemto occurat the same timeis not accidental. Old Norwegian was arguably a VO language, like Modern Norwegian, but unlike Modern Norwegian, OV order was also possible.It can be shown that it is possible to derive sentences with object shift with a verb in VP, sentences with preverbal prepositions, and with topicalized heads only from an OV structure. Therefore, when the OV order was no longer available, the other three structures could no longer be derived.
The article presents a rule-based machine translation system from Northern Sami to Norwegian. The grammatical analysis is done with Giellatekno and Divvun's North Sami program for analysis and translation. We have written the transfer component (transfer lexicon and grammatical rules) within the framework of the open machine translation system Apertium. The article contains an evaluation of translated text for two different domains. The translated texts score better on the presentation of the content than on fluent language. By classifying the errors into lexical, grammatical and pragmatic errors, we show that lexical errors are the most harmful for text comprehension. The other two types of errors give a poor language quality, but they have little effect on comprehension. The type of error that is the easiest to correct is the lexical, which is a promising conclusion for the development of a machine translation system for text comprehension.
The present paper reports on an experiment in which the use of possessives is investigated in an interpreting task from English to Polish. The English possessive determiner system is neutral with respect to the syntactic position of the antecedent possessor, while Polish distinguishes lexically between locally bound – i.e. reflexive – and non-reflexive possessive modifiers. The interpreter therefore has to ‘compute’ mentally the syntactic position of the antecedent possessor in order to make the correct choice in Polish as the target language. The study shows that this is cognitively a very demanding task in simultaneous interpreting, as many errors as well as self-corrections occur. The study furthermore shows that interpreters adapt their language to their audience, and adequate omissions, as well as correct form of the possessive occur more often when they have a group of engineers in mind than when they interpret for language specialists. We understand this to mean that the cognitive complexity of solving the cross-linguistic asymmetry in the possessive system causes more errors when the interpreter stays closer to the source text in speaking to language specialists.
