Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-v9fdk Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-10T21:10:47.260Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

What kind of Scandinavian? On interrogative noun phrases across North Germanic

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 December 2008

Øystein Alexander Vangsnes
Øystein Alexander Vangsnes*
Affiliation:
Faculty of Humanities, University of Tromsø, NO-9037 Tromsø, Norwayoystein.vangsnes@hum.uit.no
Get access

Abstract

A central objective of this paper is to show how much variation there is across Scandinavian with respect to the morphosyntactic form of interrogative noun phrases. The present paper focuses on three main types of such DPs: (i) phrases involving a cognate of English which, (ii) phrases involving the same element as manner ‘how’ (which is morphologically complex and distinct from degree ‘how’), and (iii) phrases involving ‘what’ with or without an overt kind noun. With respect to all of these different types of noun-phrase-internal wh-expressions an interesting pattern seems to emerge: there are reasons to hold that adnominal wh-expressions start out as modifiers, yielding kind-querying noun phrases, and then develop into determiners, yielding token-querying noun phrases. Although further investigations will have to determine whether such a developmental path (or cycle) is quite general in nature, it can be made perfect sense of with reference to grammaticalization triggered by wh-movement which operates on a DP-structure that distinguishes modification from determination in such a way that the locus of determination is higher than modification.

Keywords

adnominal cycledialect syntaxDP syntaxkind vs. token readingsmicro-comparative syntaxScandinavianwh-determinerswh-nominals
Type
Research Article
Information
Nordic Journal of Linguistics , Volume 31 , Special Issue 2: The syntax of nominals and noun phrases , December 2008 , pp. 227 - 251
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2008

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

REFERENCES

Anderssen, Merete. 2005. The Aquisition of Compositional Definiteness in Norwegian. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Tromsø.Google Scholar
Bennis, Hans, Corver, Norbert & Dikken, Marcel den. 1998. Predication in nominal phrases. The Journal of Comparative Germanic Linguistics 1, 85–117.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Delsing, Lars-Olof. 1993. The Internal Structure of Noun Phrases in the Scandinavian Languages: A Comparative Study. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Lund.Google Scholar
Delsing, Lars-Olof. 2003. Syntaktisk variation i nordiska nominalfraser. In Vangsnes, Øystein Alexander, Holmberg, Anders & Delsing, Lars-Olof (eds.), Dialektsyntaktiska studier av den nordiska nominalfrasen, 11–64. Oslo: Novus Press.Google Scholar
Haegeman, Liliane. To appear. The syntax of wek (‘which’) and zuk (‘such’) in West Flemish. Lingua.Google Scholar
Heggstad, Leiv, Hødnebø, Finn & Simensen, Erik. 1975. Norrøn ordbok, 3rd edn. of Gamalnorsk ordbok. Oslo: Det Norske Samlaget.Google Scholar
J. Fritzners ordbok. http://www.edd.uio.no/perl/search/search.cgi?appid=86&tabid=1275.Google Scholar
Jahr, Ernst Håkon (ed.). 1998. Språkkontakt i Norden i middelalderen, særlig i hansatida (Nord 1998:4). Copenhagen: The Nordic Council of Ministers.Google Scholar
Jahr, Ernst Håkon (ed.). 2000. Språkkontakt – Innverknaden frå nedertysk på andre nordeuropeiske språk (Nord 2000:19). Copenhagen: The Nordic Council of Ministers.Google Scholar
Julien, Marit. 2005. Nominal Phrases from a Scandinavian Perspective. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jysk Ordbog. http://www.jyskordbog.dk/ordbog/.Google Scholar
Larsen, Amund B. 1907. Kristiania bymål: Vulgærsproget med henblik på den utvungne dagligtale. Kristiania: Cammermeyer.Google Scholar
Leu, Thomas. 2008a. What for internally. Syntax 11 (1), 1–25.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Leu, Thomas. 2008b. The Internal Syntax of Determiners. Ph.D. dissertation, New York University.Google Scholar
Norsk Ordbok, vol. 6. Oslo: Det Norske Samlaget. 2007.Google Scholar
David, Pesetsky. 1987. Wh-in-situ: Movement and unselective binding. In Reuland, Eric & Meulen, Alice ter (eds.), The Representation of (In)Definiteness, 98–129. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Riemsdijk, Henk van. 2005. Silent nouns and the spurious indefinite article in Dutch. In Vulchanova, Mila & Åfarli, Tor A. (eds.), Grammar & Beyond: Essays in Honour of Lars Hellan, 163–178. Oslo: Novus Press.Google Scholar
Rietz, Johan Ernst. 1962. Svenskt dialektlexikon: Ordbok öfver svenska allmogespråket. Lund: C.W.K.Gleerups. http://runeberg.org/dialektl/.Google Scholar
The Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Vangsnes, Øystein Alexander. 1999. The Identification of Functional Architecture. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Bergen.Google Scholar
Vangsnes, Øystein Alexander. 2001. On noun phrase architecture, referentiality, and article systems. Studia Linguistica 55, 249–299CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Vangsnes, Øystein Alexander. 2008a. Decomposing manner how across colloquial Scandinavian. Studia Linguistica 62, 119–141.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Vangsnes, Øystein Alexander. 2008b. Omkring adnominalt åssen/hvordan i Oslo-målet. In Johannessen, Janne Bondi & Hagen, Kristin (eds.), Språk i Oslo: Ny forskning om talespråk, 50–62. Oslo: Novus Press.Google Scholar
Webster. 1913. http://everything2.net/index.pl?node_id=176726.Google Scholar