What kind of Scandinavian? On interrogative noun phrases across North Germanic

Abstract

A central objective of this paper is to show how much variation there is across Scandinavian with respect to the morphosyntactic form of interrogative noun phrases. The present paper focuses on three main types of such DPs: (i) phrases involving a cognate of English which, (ii) phrases involving the same element as manner ‘how’ (which is morphologically complex and distinct from degree ‘how’), and (iii) phrases involving ‘what’ with or without an overt kind noun. With respect to all of these different types of noun-phrase-internal wh-expressions an interesting pattern seems to emerge: there are reasons to hold that adnominal wh-expressions start out as modifiers, yielding kind-querying noun phrases, and then develop into determiners, yielding token-querying noun phrases. Although further investigations will have to determine whether such a developmental path (or cycle) is quite general in nature, it can be made perfect sense of with reference to grammaticalization triggered by wh-movement which operates on a DP-structure that distinguishes modification from determination in such a way that the locus of determination is higher than modification.