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.
