History Of Norwegian Research Articles

On Ek and Jak In Middle Norwegian: Mixed Methods In Historical Sociolinguistics

AbstractWork in historical sociolinguistics can broadly be divided into quantitative work which examines population‐level trends in past language use, and qualitative work which documents and explains the usage of individuals or within particular texts. In this paper, we argue for an approach which combines both of these. Using mixed methods we can achieve all the advantages of both qualitative and quantitative approaches, revealing the complexity of language use in real social contexts but situating it in a well‐described view of the historical processes at play. We demonstrate our approach with an exploration of the rise of ‘broken’ forms of the first person singular nominative pronoun in the history of Norwegian. We chart the overall progression and social patterning of the change using kernel density estimation, regression and geographically weighted regression. We then explore the wealth of fascinating local and ephemeral patterns by examining usage of particular individuals and texts.

Parameterization and change in non-finite complementation

Through the history of Nordic and Norwegian, the infinitive marker has undergone several syntactic and phonological changes. This article discusses the syntactic changes in terms of functionalist and generativist grammaticalization theory. The article starts with a brief review of the origin and use of the infinitive marker in Germanic, followed by a presentation of the syntactic characteristics of infinitive constructions in Old Norse, where the author offers arguments in support of analyzing the infinitive marker as a complementizer word. In Middle and Early Modern Norwegian, the infinitive marker is reanalyzed as a clitic adjoined to the verb. A later reanalysis in Modern Norwegian has resulted in the infinitive marker once again occupying the complementizer position. The history of the Norwegian infinitive marker thus exhibits different types of grammaticalization (lexical word > grammatical word, and word > clitic), degrammaticalization (clitic > word), and different kinds of realization of a functional category.