This article investigates the placement of subjects and objects in American heritage Norwegian (AmNo). While previous studies of argument placement in AmNo (Anderssen & Westergaard 2020) have only included present-day heritage and homeland speakers, we make use of new corpus resources and compare present-day heritage speakers to an older generation of heritage speakers, emigrant speakers, and homeland dialect speakers born around the time of mass emigration. The study includes three positions in the clause: the initial position (Spec-CP) in main clauses, and placement before and after negation (i.e., subject shift and object shift). The results show that while the structure of the C-domain appears to be intact, there is an increasing preference for SV order in the heritage language (see also Westergaard & Lohndal 2019, Westergaard et al. 2021). We argue that this has consequences for the distribution of subjects and objects further down in the clause; however, apart from this, the principles for subject shift and object shift remain remarkably stable over time. To a large extent, variation in subject shift and object shift observed in the baseline is transmitted across generations in American Norwegian; a clear difference is only observed in the limited context of tag questions (see also Anderssen & Westergaard 2020). We suggest that the increase in SV order in American Norwegian is a consequence of pressure to ease processing (see, e.g., Polinsky 2018), although cross-linguistic influence might also be involved. There is little (or no) evidence of change of the underlying syntax of American Norwegian.

Aspectual verbs with infinitival complements are often considered ambiguous when it comes to the question of whether they should be classified as raising or control verbs. In present-day German, argument structure properties seem to favor a raising analysis, but arguments for a control analysis cannot be dismissed. Word order properties do not provide conclusive evidence either and seem to support the ambiguity of aspectual verbs in present-day German. However, new diachronic evidence on word order properties of infinitival complements in uncontested raising and control constructions shows that well-established word order differences between raising and control constructions are a fairly recent development in the history of infinitival constructions (De Cesare 2021): Until about the mid eighteenth century, infinitival complements of both raising and control verbs tend to precede the finite verb in final position, with the preference of control verbs for extraposition developing only later. In present-day German, the extraposition of infinitival complements is considered a strong criterion for the sentential nature of the postposed infinitive and thus of the biclausal structure of the infinitival pattern, at least since the influential work of Bech (1983). In the present article, we look into the word order properties of ingressive aspectualizers over time and evaluate them against the emergence of a systematic distinction of raising and control verbs in the recent history of German, aiming at a deeper understanding of the syntactic behavior of aspectual verbs in present-day German.

This article discusses pronominal gender agreement in Dutch. Based on a sentence completion task filled out by about 10,000 speakers, we provide evidence for the claim that there is an ongoing shift from lexical to semantic agreement in Dutch, even in a formal register. Results of correspondence and cluster analyses indicate that nouns with the same degree of individuation group together. Furthermore, the analyses reveal an age effect, with three distinct speaker groups that follow a specific gender agreement pattern. Younger speakers are more semantically oriented than older speakers, who are more lexically oriented, which points to apparent-time language change.

In Modern Standard German both bare infinitives and those formed with the particle zu are used as independent main clause predicates, where they each have illocutionary force. While the former can be associated with a range of functions, the latter specifically encodes indignation towards a state of affairs on the part of the speaker. Taking a constructionist approach, I argue that the exclamative zu-infinitive has emerged as a schematic construction, which is best described as a conventionalized form–function relation between the structure [X + zu + Inf] and an attitudinal semantic feature that represents speaker indignation. I provide diachronic data as well as a cross-linguistic comparison to support this constructionalization process.