Abstract
This study investigates the extent to which speakers of American Norwegian (AmNo), a heritage language spoken in the United States and Canada, use the indefinite article in classifying predicate constructions (‘He is (a) doctor’). Despite intense contact with English, which uses the indefinite article, most AmNo speakers have retained bare nouns, i.e., the pattern of Norwegian as spoken in Norway. However, a minority of the speakers use the indefinite article to some extent. I argue that generally, this use of the indefinite article has arisen through attrition (i.e., a change during the lifetime of individuals), not through divergent attainment causing systematic, parametric change in the Norwegian grammar of these speakers. I also argue that representational economy is one of the factors that may have contributed to the relative stability of bare nouns.
Highlights
Norwegian as spoken in Norway ( European Norwegian, or EurNo) allows bare, singular nouns in some contexts where English does not
Having examined bare predicate nouns versus predicate nouns with an indefinite article in more detail, my position is that the use of the indefinite article in predicate constructions is not due to a parametric change involving an extension of the feature Num to all nominals; in other words, it does not result from divergent attainment
Whilst the last two subsections discussed the use of the indefinite article from the perspective of parametric change, this section is devoted to attrition
Summary
Norwegian as spoken in Norway ( European Norwegian, or EurNo) allows bare, singular nouns in some contexts where English does not. The patterns found in these predicate constructions can serve as windows into the variation in the structure of nominal phrases more generally: they can be indicative of whether a language allows small nominal phrases that lack a functional projection for Number (Munn and Schmitt 2002, 2005; Deprez 2005; see Pereltsvaig 2006) Studying this variation in the context of AmNo is interesting; it can contribute to our understanding of syntactic variation and change in contact situations, given the intense contact between AmNo and English. The research questions addressed are the following: First, in syntactic environments where English and EurNo differ in terms of using bare nouns versus nouns with an indefinite article, which patterns are preferred by AmNo speakers?
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