The Syntax of Mainland Scandinavian

The Syntax of Mainland Scandinavian
Author: Jan Terje Faarlund
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 288
Release: 2019-03-21
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 019255008X

This book explores the syntactic structures of Mainland Scandinavian, a term that covers the Northern Germanic languages spoken in Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and parts of Finland. The continuum of mutually intelligible standard languages, regional varieties, and dialects stretching from southern Jutland to eastern Finland share many syntactic patterns and features, but also present interesting syntactic differences. In this volume, Jan Terje Faarlund discusses the main syntactic features of the national languages, alongside the most widespread or typologically interesting features of the non-standard varieties. Each topic is illustrated with examples drawn from reference grammars, research literature, corpora of various sorts, and the author's own research. The framework is current generative grammar, but the volume is descriptive in nature, with technical formalities and theoretical discussion kept to a minimum. It will hence be a valuable reference for students and researchers working on any Scandinavian language, as well as for syntacticians and typologists interested in Scandinavian facts and data without necessarily being able to read Scandinavian.

Topics in Scandinavian Syntax

Topics in Scandinavian Syntax
Author: L. Hellan
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 275
Release: 2012-12-06
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9400945728

The present collection of papers grew out of a Workshop on Scandinavian Syntax and Theory of Grammar, held in Trondheim in 1982. Five of the contributions - those by Maling, Herslund, Cooper, Platzack and Thniinsson - are developments of papers read at this workshop, and all of the contributions reflect (and have partly inspired) the strong momentum which this area of research has gained over the last few years. It is our hope that the collection will be useful for those who want to familiarize themselves with this research, as well as for those actively engaged in it. We are grateful to the authors for their collaboration in getting the volume together, and to Frank Heny and the Reidel staff (Martin Scrivener, editor, in particular) for their help, encouragement and patience through the various phases of the production of this book. Very many thanks also to our anonymous referees, and to Elisabet Engdahl for help and advice. KIRST! KOCH CHRISTENSEN LARS HELLAN vii LARS HELLAN AND KIRSTI KOCH CHRISTENSEN INTRODUCTION O. INTRODUCTION A natural theoretical perspective for a language-family-oriented anthology like the present one is that of COMPARATIVE RESEARCH. This is not to say that the papers of this volume are all focused on comparative issues (in fact, most of them are not), but rather that the language family from which most of the data are drawn lends itself naturally to comparative studies.

The Role of Inflection in Scandinavian Syntax

The Role of Inflection in Scandinavian Syntax
Author: Anders Holmberg
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 264
Release: 1995-06-29
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 0195067460

The authors present a theory of the role which subject-verb agreement and case morphology play in syntax, based mainly on a detailed comparison of the syntactic and inflectional properties of the Scandinavian languages.

Studies in Övdalian Morphology and Syntax

Studies in Övdalian Morphology and Syntax
Author: Kristine Bentzen
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
Total Pages: 239
Release: 2015-01-22
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9027269130

Övdalian is spoken in central Sweden by about 2000 speakers. Traditionally categorized as a dialect of Swedish, it has not received much international attention. However, Övdalian is typologically closer to Faroese or Icelandic than it is to Swedish, and since it has been spoken in relative isolation for about 1000 years, a number of interesting linguistic archaisms have been preserved and innovations have developed. This volume provides seven papers about Övdalian morphology and syntax. The papers, all based on extensive fieldwork, cover topics such as verb movement, subject doubling, wh-words and case in Övdalian. Constituting the first comprehensive linguistic description of Övdalian in English, this volume is of interest for linguists in the fields of Scandinavian and Germanic linguistics, and also historical linguists will be thrilled by some of the presented data. The data and the analyses presented here furthermore challenge our view of the morphosyntax of the Scandinavian languages in some cases – as could be expected when a new language enters the linguistic arena.

Clitics in the Languages of Europe

Clitics in the Languages of Europe
Author: Henk van Riemsdijk
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
Total Pages: 1048
Release: 2011-03-01
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 3110804018

The series is a platform for contributions of all kinds to this rapidly developing field. General problems are studied from the perspective of individual languages, language families, language groups, or language samples. Conclusions are the result of a deepened study of empirical data. Special emphasis is given to little-known languages, whose analysis may shed new light on long-standing problems in general linguistics.

Icelandic Morphosyntax and Argument Structure

Icelandic Morphosyntax and Argument Structure
Author: Jim Wood
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 334
Release: 2015-01-05
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 3319091387

This book provides a detailed study of Icelandic argument structure alternations within a syntactic theory of argument structure. Building on recent theorizing within the Minimalist Program and Distributed Morphology, the author proposes that much of what is traditionally attributed to syntax should be relegated to the interfaces, and adapts the late insertion theory of morphology to semantics. The resulting system forms sound-meaning pairs by generating hierarchical structures that can be translated into morphological representations, on the one hand, and semantic representations, on the other. The syntactic primitives, however, underdetermine both morphophonology and semantics. Without appealing to special stipulations, the theory derives constraints on the external argument of causative-alternation verbs, interpretive restrictions on nominative objects, and the optionally agentive interpretation of verbs denoting self-directed motion.

Morphology-Driven Syntax

Morphology-Driven Syntax
Author: Bernhard Wolfgang Rohrbacher
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
Total Pages: 308
Release: 1999-06-15
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9027299293

This book argues that syntactic parameters are set in a principled fashion on the basis of overt functional morphology. The main focus of the book is on the different positions of the finite verb in the Germanic SVO languages. In addition, other syntactic phenomena (null subjects, transitive expletive constructions and object shift) and other language families (Romance, Semitic and Slavic) are discussed. A common explanation for all of the discussed phenomena is proposed: If and only if the features for “person” are distinctively marked by the agreement morphology, the agreement affixes are listed separately in the lexicon and project phrases of their own in syntax where they attract the verb to the head positions and allow the specifier positions to be filled by various phonologically (un)realized elements. Special attention is given to issues of historical development and child language acquisition.

Feature Distribution in Swedish Noun Phrases

Feature Distribution in Swedish Noun Phrases
Author: Kersti Borjars
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 308
Release: 1999-01-26
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 0631208712

This book examines in some detail two issues associated with Swedish noun phrases. Firstly, it considers the issue of the headedness of these phrases in the light of a general discussion of criteria for head status. Secondly, the status of the definite ending is discussed from a typological perspective. Based on the findings of this examination of the data, a theoretical account of Swedish noun phrases is provided in terms of Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar.

Studies in Comparative Germanic Syntax

Studies in Comparative Germanic Syntax
Author: H. Haider
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 345
Release: 2013-03-09
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 9401584168

o. COMPARATIVE GERMANIC SYNTAX This volume contains 13 papers that were prepared for the Seventh Workshop on Comparative Germanie Syntax at the University of Stuttgart in November 1991. In defining the theme both of the workshop and of this volume, we have taken "comparative" in "comparative Germanic syntax" to mean that at least two languages should be analyzed and "Germanic" to mean that at least one of these languages should be Germanic. There was no require ment as such that the research presented should be situated within the framework known as Principles and Parameters Theory (previously known as Government and Binding Theory), though it probably is no accident that this nevertheless turned out to be the case. Within this theory, it is seen as highly desirable to be able to account for several differences on the surface by deriving them from fewer under lying differences. The reason is that, in order to explain the ease with which children acquire language, it is assumed that not all knowledge of any given language is the result of learning, but that instead children already possess part of this knowledge at birth (the innate part of linguistic knowledge will obviously be the same for all human beings, and thus this theory also provides an explanation of language universals). The fewer "real" (i.e.