This paper presents a syntactic account of the distribution of subject clitics in the Oslo dialect of Norwegian. In addition to providing a unified explanation for some seemingly unrelated facts about subject clitics, this account will be shown to have implications for the proper definition of the notions ‘variable’ and ‘anaphor’.

In Norwegian, these two types of constructions expressing an NP with a (prenominal) possessor exist:

(i) Pers bil ‘Peter's car’

(ii) Per sin bil Peter his, refl. car ‘Peter's car’

I argue that the s in (i) is not a case affix, but rather a variant of sin. Furthermore, I discuss how [Per] in (ii) assigned Case, and the fact that Per and sin apparently share a theta-role. I suggest that they constitute a chain in (ii), to which Case and a theta-role is assigned.

I shall compare the definition of “chain” in Chomsky 1981 to the modified definition of Kayne 1981. The modified definition, together with other principles suggested by Kayne 1981/1983, not only permits our analysis of (ii), but also provides interesting predictions about this construction, and indirectly about the lack of it in a related language, Icelandic.

This paper reviews various approaches to describe the verb second phenomenon of Germanic languages within generative transformational grammar. The solution to the descriptive problem seems to be to assume that the finite verb in main clauses has the same position as the complementizer in subordinate clauses. Various ways to explain the presence of this word order in Germanic languages are presented in the final part of the paper.

In this article I argue that Taraldsen's (1983) analysis of verb particle constructions cannot be maintained because it predicts a considerable subset of the grammatical particle constructions to be ungrammatical, as well as some ungrammatical particle constructions to be grammatical. In my analysis of verb particle constructions as causative constructions, I borrow the device of reanalysis from Taraldsen. This reanalysis is crucially taken as a licensing condition for the rule of particle movement, but it does not constitute a sufficient condition for the possibility of particle movement, since I will also argue that this rule is subject to essentially non-syntactic restrictions so that its output cannot be wholly deduced from GB syntax subtheories.