Abstract
AbstractNon-finite complementation strategies found in American Norwegian (AmNo) (made available by the Corpus of American Nordic Speech (CANS)) reveal unique and diverging patterns when compared to both standard and dialectal Norwegian and English. We argue in this paper that the majority of these divergent structures are the result of overextension (Rinke & Flores, 2014; Rinke et al., 2018; Putnam & Hoffman, 2021; Kupisch, 2014), where heritage language speakers produce structures that differ from both grammars in an attempt to generate forms that are distinct from the more dominant language. Our treatment of these nuanced structures in AmNo shows that this heritage grammar significantly restricts bare (ornaked) TPs (Situations) serving as non-finite complements. To avoid bare TP-complements, AmNo has developed two distinct, yet related strategies, (1) reducing non-finite complements tovPs (Events), or (2) incorporating an additional element, a preposition, to ensure that the non-finite complement functions as the object of a preposition. We analyze this latter strategy as an instance of the emergence of structural salience (Polinsky, 2018) in the syntax of AmNo and suggest that this variation is best understood as a syntax–semantics interface phenomenon.
Highlights
A consistent and pervasive narrative in the literature on the syntactic properties of heritage languages is that while certain domains, such as morphology, are more susceptible to change and attrition, the core properties of syntax remain unaffected both in acquisition and development across the lifespan (Lohndal, 2021; Putnam et al, 2021; Polinsky, 2018; Polinsky & Scontras, 2020; Lohndal et al, 2019)
The degree of variation in the structure of non-finite complements and their infinitive markers underscores three important points which we will touch upon in more detail in our analysis : First, there does not appear to be a discernible pattern in the American Norwegian (AmNo) data elicited from Corpus of American Nordic Speech (CANS) in which certain types of infinitival constructions strongly prefer a particular structure in non-finite complementation
In the analysis we develop here, we adopt the stance that non-finite complementation is a combination of syntactic and semantic requirements: the predicate in the matrix clause has certain requirements that must be compatible with those found in the candidate complement clause, along the lines of those outlined above
Summary
A consistent and pervasive narrative in the literature on the syntactic properties of heritage languages is that while certain domains, such as morphology, are more susceptible to change and attrition, the core properties of syntax remain unaffected both in acquisition and development across the lifespan (Lohndal, 2021; Putnam et al, 2021; Polinsky, 2018; Polinsky & Scontras, 2020; Lohndal et al, 2019). The construction in (5) exhibits the opposite structure, here Bokmål requires the preposition (‘til’ in written language) in addition to the infinitive marker å before the non-finite complement, while the preposition is not included in the AmNo example. We present evidence that some speakers of AmNo have (tacitly) developed an innovative strategy that prevents the selection of ‘bare’ TP-non-finite complements These complements cannot appear ‘naked’ and must either be reduced to vPs or be ‘covered up’ by a preposition (see §5 for an in depth treatment). This pattern in the AmNo-data shows a trend towards overextension (a.k.a. hyperextension), where these speakers produce outputs that sound more ‘Norwegian-like’ (i.e., those that are ‘covered’ with both a preposition and the infinitive marker å), creating nuances that are not attested in Bokmål or any known source dialects of Norwegian.
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