Mainland Scandinavian Languages Research Articles

Too True to Be Good? The Non-Uniformity of Extraction from Adjunct Clauses in English

Adjunct clauses are traditionally assumed to be strong islands for extraction across languages. However, the universal island status of adjunct clauses has been challenged by studies showing that extraction is possible from finite adjunct clauses in the Mainland Scandinavian languages. The possibility of extraction in these languages appears to be affected by various factors, including the type of adjunct clause, the type of extraction dependency, and the presence of contextual facilitation. These findings call for a re-evaluation of the islandhood of adjunct clauses in English. We conducted an acceptability judgment study on relativization from three types of finite adjunct clauses in English (if-, when-, and because-clauses) in the presence of supporting context. We found that the three clause types showed rather non-uniform acceptability patterns: extraction from when- and because-clauses both yielded significantly lower ratings than extraction from if-clauses, which patterned with non-island that-clauses. Our results suggest that at least for relativization, if- and when-adjuncts are not invariably strong islands in English, and that extra-grammatical factors may be key in understanding island structures traditionally assumed to be purely syntactic in nature.

Extraction from Relative Clauses in Icelandic and Swedish: A Parallel Investigation

Extraction from relative clauses is generally taken to be unacceptable in Icelandic, unlike in the Mainland Scandinavian languages. Recent studies on Mainland Scandinavian show that the type of dependency as well as the embedding predicate matters for the acceptability of such extractions, and the study of spontaneously produced examples has improved our ability to create felicitous extraction contexts. The studies of Icelandic extraction predate these findings, and there is to date no study which systematically compares parallel sentences in Icelandic and Mainland Scandinavian. This article presents such a study, using two acceptability judgment experiments, one in Icelandic and one in Swedish, drawing on newly gained insights about fronting conditions in the two languages to create plausible contexts. The Icelandic participants rated extraction from relative clauses as unnatural, with a very large acceptability cost compared to in situ versions and good fillers. Extraction from að-clauses received mixed ratings, and local fronting was rated on a par with the in situ versions. In Swedish, extraction from relative clauses was rated as natural a majority of the time. There was no extraction cost in local fronting, extraction from att-clauses, or extraction from relative clauses in existential sentences, while extraction with other embedding predicates incurred some cost. No differences relating to the embedding predicate were seen in Icelandic. The study corroborates the view that extraction from relative clauses is unacceptable in Icelandic.

Extraction from English RCs and Cross-Linguistic Similarities in the Environments That Facilitate Extraction

In the first two decades following Ross’s Constraints on Variables in Syntax, a picture emerged in which the Mainland Scandinavian (MS) languages appeared to systematically evade some of the locality constraints proposed by Ross, including the relative clause (RC) part of the complex NP constraint. The MS extraction patterns remain a topic of debate, but there is no consensus as to why extraction from RCs should be so degraded in English (compared to MS)—or why it should be so acceptable in MS (compared to English). We present experiment results which indicate that English should be counted among the languages that allow extraction from RCs in at least some environments. Our results suggest a negligible island effect for RCs in predicate nominal environments and a substantially reduced island effect for those in canonical existential environments. In addition, we show that the size of the island effect resulting from extraction from an RC under a transitive verb is substantially reduced when the transitive verb is used to make an indirect existential claim. We present arguments that patterns of RC sub-extraction discovered in Mainland Scandinavian languages are mirrored in English, and we highlight methodological innovations that we believe may be useful for further investigation into this and other topics.

Expressions of genericity in Mainland Scandinavian languages

Expressions of genericity in Mainland Scandinavian languages

The Island Is Still There: Experimental Evidence For The Inescapability Of Relative Clauses In English*

AbstractIt is standardly assumed that relative clauses are islands for extraction in English, and that constraints on extraction from syntactic islands are universal. However, it has been shown that the Mainland Scandinavian languages provide a large variety of counterexamples. This study investigates the island status of English relative clauses in the light of these counterexamples. 190 native speakers provided acceptability judgments on a 5‐point Likert scale of 48 target sentences. The results show that, unlike in Danish, acceptability of extraction is not correlated with frequency of occurrence of the matrix verb or with exposure over time. Furthermore, there is no difference in acceptability between moving a topic or a wh‐element out of a relative clause. We argue that this supports the traditional analysis of English relative clauses as strong islands, and that the results are compatible with a parametric account of language variation.

Някои наблюдения върху представянето на спрежението на силните глаголи в учебни пособия по трите континентални скандинавски езика. Част II – норвежки и датски език

This is the second part of a two-part article which discusses and contrasts the ways in which strong verbs are usually described in educational materials for the three Mainland Scandinavian languages as L2. The second part examines materials for Norwegian and Danish. It is concluded that they tend to place less emphasis on the distinction between ‘strong’ and ‘irregular’ verbs and the regular patterns found in their conjugation than their Swedish counterparts do. Some explanations for this fact are offered.

Някои наблюдения върху представянето на спрежението на силните глаголи в учебни пособия по трите континентални скандинавски езика. Част I – шведски език

This is the first part of a two-part article which discusses and contrasts the ways in which strong verbs are usually described in educational materials for the three Mainland Scandinavian languages as L2. The first part examines materials for Swedish. It demonstrates that in spite of a certain variation, Swedish strong verbs are generally distinguished more or less systematically from irregular ones and the regular patterns found in their conjugation are emphasised.

Sig mig *hva' som* jeg skal gøre med sætningsskemaet: De indledende pladser i nudanske indirekte spørgesætninger

This paper discusses the structure of indirect question clauses in Danish. The construction is well-described in the literature, at least as far as the norm language is concerned. However, there is quite an amount of variation in certain syntactic contexts. Some of these have been touched upon in the literature, but not all. The interesting point concerning indirect question clauses in Danish is that their structure seems to be opaque even to language users normally associated with norm-obedience or even norm-setting. When clues like interpunctuation and vicarious subjects are considered, the structure of such sentences seems comparable to the structures of the other Mainland Scandinavian languages, Norwegian and Swedish.

On the Rich Agreement Hypothesis and varieties of embedded V2

AbstractThis paper addresses the controversy between Koeneman & Zeijlstra (K&Z) (2014) and Heycock & Sundquist (2017) concerning the viability of K&Z’s strong version of the Rich Agreement Hypothesis in the light of apparent counterexamples from the diachrony of Danish. It makes the general point that establishing whether or not cases of putative V-to-I movement in subordinate clauses can be reanalyzed as V-to-C, i.e. as embedded Verb Second (EV2), depends on the EV2-type of a language. The empirical discussion concerns appositive relatives and conditional protases, with V-to-C in the former being in principle compatible with ‘narrow’ nEV2 as displayed by Modern Mainland Scandinavian languages, and V-to-C in the latter with Old Norse-style ‘broad’ bEV2. It is concluded that the critical stages of Danish need to be scrutinized more closely before the above dispute can be settled.

The Use of Passive Voice in Academic Writing

Abstract The paper studies the use of the passive voice in academic texts written in Mainland Scandinavian languages (Danish, Norwegian and Swedish) by their native speakers and by adult Polish learners of those languages. The corpus consists of 37 MA theses written in Scandinavia and in Poland. A number of referring verbs were chosen for the purpose of the analysis. The results show that while there are discrepancies in the use of the passive voice in texts written by Polish and Scandinavian students, they cannot be unequivocally diagnosed as resulting from the grammatical and stylistic influence of the mother tongue.

The semantics of Scandinavian pancake constructions

AbstractA classical topic in the syntax of the mainland Scandinavian languages is so-called pancake clauses where there seemingly is disagreement between the subject and the predicative adjective, as inPannekaker er godt‘Pancakes(f):indf:plbe:prsgood:n:sg’; the subject is in the plural, whereas the predicative adjective is in the neuter singular. According to one of the several approaches, these clauses display a type of semantic agreement. Recently, it has also been argued that there are at least four different types of pancake constructions.In this article, the semantic relationship between the different constructions is investigated further. It is argued that, diachronically, pancake agreement started with subjects interpreted as virtual, ungrounded processes, and that the absence of grounding has been reinterpreted as absence of spatial boundedness in the latest kind of pancake construction. The analysis is supported by a diachronic corpus investigation. The emphasis on virtual reference is a new feature with the current paper, and it enables us to set aside an objection against the semantic agreement analysis. The diachronic corpus investigation enables us to revise, empirically, earlier suggestions as to when the pancake constructions originated: They are well attested from the mid-1800s, in both Swedish and Norwegian Nynorsk.

On the Island Sensitivity of Topicalization in Norwegian: An Experimental Investigation

Mainland Scandinavian languages have been reported to allow movement from embedded questions, relative clauses, and complex NPs—domains commonly considered to be islands crosslinguistically. Yet in formal acceptability studies Scandinavian participants often show ‘island effects’: they reject island-violating movement similarly to native speakers of ‘island-sensitive’ languages. To investigate this apparent mismatch between informal and formal judgments, we conducted two acceptability judgment experiments testing the acceptability of topicalization from various island domains in Norwegian. We were interested in determining whether we could (i) find evidence for island insensitivity and (ii) pin down the source of qualitatively different island effects. We asked whether such effects are best explained as reflecting violations of a uniform syntactic constraint or extrasyntactic factors. Our results suggest that embedded questions and relative clauses are not uniform syntactic islands for topicalization, but complex NPs are. Unexpectedly, we also found evidence suggesting that conditional adjunct clauses may not be islands.

Generics in Mainland Scandinavian languages

Abstract The paper examines nominal expressions of genericity as found in generic texts (ornithological atlases) in Mainland Scandinavian languages. The material is subdivided into first mentions and subsequent mentions and these are reported separately. Subsequent mentions can be said to be subject to conflicting principles – on the one hand they are generic, on the other anaphoric. The results show that all three languages prefer singular definite NPs to express first mention genericity, however, significant differences are found in subsequent mentions.

Inalienable Possession in Swedish and Danish – A Diachronic Perspective

Abstract In this paper we discuss the alienability splits in two Mainland Scandinavian languages, Swedish and Danish, in a diachronic context. Although it is not universally acknowledged that such splits exist in modern Scandinavian languages, many nouns typically included in inalienable structures such as kinship terms, body part nouns and nouns describing culturally important items show different behaviour from those considered alienable. The differences involve the use of (reflexive) possessive pronouns vs. the definite article, which differentiates the Scandinavian languages from e.g. English. As the definite article is a relatively new arrival in the Scandinavian languages, we look at when the modern pattern could have evolved by a close examination of possessive structures with potential inalienables in Old Swedish and Old Danish. Our results reveal that to begin with, inalienables are usually bare nouns and come to be marked with the definite article in the course of its grammaticalization.

Investigating Variation in Island Effects: A Case Study of Norwegian Wh-Extraction.

We present a series of large-scale formal acceptability judgment studies that explored Norwegian island phenomena in order to follow up on previous observations that speakers of Mainland Scandinavian languages like Norwegian accept violations of certain island constraints that are unacceptable in most languages cross-linguistically. We tested the acceptability of wh-extraction from five island types: whether-, complex NP, subject, adjunct, and relative clause (RC) islands. We found clear evidence of subject and adjunct island effects on wh-extraction. We failed to find evidence that Norwegians accept wh-extraction out of complex NPs and RCs. Our participants judged wh-extraction from complex NPs and RCs to be just as unacceptable as subject and adjunct island violations. The pattern of effects in Norwegian paralleled island effects that recent experimental work has documented in other languages like English and Italian (Sprouse et al. 2012; Sprouse et al. 2016). Norwegian judgments consistently differed from prior findings for one island type: whether-islands. Our results reveal that Norwegians exhibit significant inter-individual variation in their sensitivity to whether-island effects, with many participants exhibiting no sensitivity to whether-island violations whatsoever. We discuss the implications of our findings for universalist approaches to island constraints. We also suggest ways of reconciling our results with previous observations, and offer a systematic experimental framework in which future research can investigate factors that govern apparent island insensitivity.

Verb‐second in embedded clauses in Faroese

AbstractThere has been considerable controversy in the linguistic literature about the nature of Vfin‐Adv (V2) order in subject‐initial embedded clauses in Faroese: Is it the result of a V‐to‐T movement, as is typically assumed for Icelandic, or is it a root phenomenon, i.e. V‐to‐C movement, as usually assumed for the standard Mainland Scandinavian languages. Heycock et al. (2012) argue that both kinds of Vfin‐Adv order can be found in Faroese embedded clauses and this paper provides further evidence for that claim. On the assumption that V‐to‐T is still a possibility in Faroese, some versions of the so‐called Rich Agreement Hypothesis (e.g. Bobaljik & Thráinsson 1998) predict that transitive expletives should also be possible in Faroese. This prediction is borne out. However, contrary to predictions regarding direct connection between verbal inflection on the one hand and verb movement and transitive expletive constructions on the other hand, it is demonstrated that speakers who distinguish tense and agreement morphemes most clearly in their speech are neither more likely to accept transitive expletives nor V2‐orders in various types of embedded clauses than speakers who do not distinguish tense and agreement morphemes as clearly. It is maintained that while Vfin‐Adv is on its way out in Faroese, presumably because of diminishing morphological support and partially ambiguous syntactic evidence, the language has not yet reached the Mainland Scandinavian state in this respect.

Why is Danish so difficult to understand for fellow Scandinavians?

It has consistently been shown that among the three mainland Scandinavian languages, Danish is most difficult to understand for fellow Scandinavians. Recent research suggests that Danish is spoken significantly faster than Norwegian and Swedish. This finding might partly explain the asymmetric intelligibility among Scandinavian languages. However, since fast speech goes hand in hand with a high amount of speech reduction, the question arises whether the high speech rate as such impairs intelligibility, or the high amount of reduction. In this paper we tear apart these two factors by auditorily presenting 168 Norwegian- and Swedish-speaking participants with 50 monotonised nonsense sentences in four conditions (quick and unclear, slow and clear, quick and clear, slow and unclear) in a translation task. Our results suggest that speech rate has a larger impact on the intelligibility of monotonised speech than naturally occurring reduction.

Inflections on pre-nominal adjectives in Germanic: Main types, subtypes, and subset relations

In order to contribute to the understanding of the nature of inflection, this paper investigates the endings on pre-nominal adjectives in four Germanic languages: Dutch, Norwegian, German, and Yiddish. Incorporating detailed observations about Yiddish in general and non-canonical nominals in particular, this study confirms Harbert’s (The Germanic languages, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 2007) classification of the Mainland Scandinavian languages as semantically determining their inflections but of German as encoding case, number, and gender on its endings. The latter is shown to be regulated by lexical factors. Dutch is grouped with Norwegian and Yiddish with German. While all four languages differ in their details, the paper proposes that compared to Dutch, the Norwegian weak inflections require a subset of definiteness (sub-)components and that in comparison to German, the Yiddish weak inflections require a subset of lexical triggers. Whereas weak endings only surface inside DPs, which are necessarily definite in Dutch and Norwegian, strong endings are shown to appear in more diverse contexts. Given the language-specific conditions on the distribution of the weak inflections, the strong endings are interpreted as the elsewhere case in all languages.

Two suppletive adjectives in Megleno-Romanian

This study involves the existence in Megleno-Romanian dialects of a lexically suppletive distinction between singular and plural forms of the adjectives meaning ‘small’ and ‘big’. The phenomenon has gone largely unnoticed both by comparative Romance linguists and by morphological theorists yet it is both typologically surprising and theoretically significant. Analysis of a remarkably similar phenomenon in mainland Scandinavian languages led Börjars and Vincent (2011) to propose a considerably attenuated version of Maiden’s claim (2004) that lexical synonymy can drive the diachronic emergence of suppletion. My close investigation of the the source of the suppletion in Megleno-Romanian, and consideration of the Scandinavian facts in the light of the Megleno-Romanian data, will show that in fact the emergence of suppletion in just these adjectives constitutes excellent evidence for the claim that lexical synonymy favours suppletion.

Detecting the Late Stages of Syntactic Change: The Loss of V-to-T in Faroese

While all of the Scandinavian languages have verb-second order in main clauses, they vary in the word order in subordinate clauses: in Icelandic the finite verb appears in a high position, to the left of negation and sentence-medial adverbs, while in all of the standard Mainland Scandinavian languages it remains in a low position, to the right of these elements. This order in Mainland Scandinavian is known to be the result of a historical change, and has frequently been tied to the loss of agreement morphology. Faroese has been argued to be currently undergoing a change of the same type, but it has proved difficult to establish a sound empirical footing for the various claims about the syntax of this language. In this article we present data from three experimental investigations of acceptability, supplemented with a study of available texts, that show that the language is very close to completing the change in the loss of the high position for the verb, but that its syntax is still distinct in this respect from that of Danish, the mainland Scandinavian language with which it is in most contact. In addition to establishing a firmer empirical basis for theories of verb movement, our study also makes the methodological point that grammaticality-judgment tasks can yield extremely fine-grained results even in cases where variability is at issue.