Norwegian Verbs Research Articles

Seem and Appear and Their Norwegian Verbal Counterparts: A Cross-Register Contrastive Study

ABSTRACT Verbs such as seem and appear combine features of evidential meaning with epistemic modality. This study takes a corpus-based, contrastive view of such verbs in Norwegian and English. It investigates the frequencies, patterns and meanings of seem, appear and their Norwegian correspondences virke, synes and se ut in English fiction and academic prose. Both similarities and differences are found across languages and registers. Appear and synes are clearly more frequent in academic prose and can therefore be characterised as more formal. Of all the verbs investigated, seem has the greatest syntactic flexibility. The Norwegian verbs show more syntactic variation across lexemes than the English verbs do. The English verbs are arguably more grammaticalised in their evidential meanings: they occur more regularly with catenative function, and are also complemented directly by NPs and nominal clauses rather than by PPs and adverbial clauses, which is often the pattern of the Norwegian verbs.

Norwegian synes and tro and their English translations

The paper explores the possibility of using translation corpora for disambiguating the semantic content with some basic implications for second language acquisition. Norwegian verbs 'synes' and 'tro' are used as a baseline for the comparison. Their semantic content is systematically explored with help of the translation pairs found in the English-Norwegian Parallel Corpus. This article shows how translation corpora and contrastive analysis help to clarify similarities and differences in meaning and how it can clarify differences between the compared languages.

Norwegian få ‘get’: A survey of its uses in present-day Riksmål/Bokmål

The present survey of the uses of the Norwegian verb få ‘get’ is based on its converse relationship to the three-place achievement predicate gi ‘give’, which combines with an agentive subject, a recipient indirect object and a direct object. The syntactic constructions in which få appears and their relative frequency of occurrence are described on the basis of a corpus consisting of 779 examples from works of present-day Norwegian fictional and nonfictional prose. About 60% of the examples have NP or PP arguments only and about 40% show, in addition or only, a nonfinite verb form. The former group of constructions comprises numerous examples representing syntactically complex lexical predicates. The latter group consists of four different construction types that show grammaticalization features: causative with an infinitive with the marker å (å-infinitive); modal with the bare infinitive; “recipient passive” with a passive past participle; and “resultative active” with an active past participle. In addition, there is an “infinitival relative” construction where an å-infinitive is adjoined to the object of få. These various types of constructions are investigated with regard to the extent to which the arguments of få reflect or deviate from the semantic properties of gi in the basic use of this verb as a three-place achievement predicate.

How do words change inflection class? Diachronic evidence from Norwegian

In cases of diachronic change, do lexemes shift inflection class gradually or in one leap? Evidence is presented from Norwegian verbs and nouns. These seem to behave somewhat differently: Verbs shift more gradually, nouns more abruptly. An alternative account for the verbs, presented by Kusters [Kusters, W., 2003. Linguistic Complexity: The Influence of Social Change (LOT 77). LOT, Leiden], arguing that verbs shift class in one leap, is argued to be inadequate. The difference between verbs and nouns in Norwegian is unexpected, given Rhodes’s [Rhodes, R., 1987. Paradigms large and small. In: Aske, J. (Ed.), Proceedings of the Thirteenth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics society, vol. 13, pp. 223–234] claim that noun inflection is more ‘quirky’ than is verb inflection. Perhaps the difference has to do with the observation that, in Norwegian, the “basic form” of the verb is more inflectionally informative than that of the noun. It is shown that the diachronic changes in Norwegian do not endanger the No Blur Principle [Carstairs-McCarthy, A., 1994. Inflection class, gender and the principle of contrast. Language 70, 737–788].

A possible constraint on non-affixal inflection

Starting out from observational gaps in the Norwegian verb inflection, a constraint is suggested on non-affixal inflection. A previous suggestion is shown not to suffice. A revised version, the Stem Alternation Constraint, is suggested. This constraint seems empirically adequate when confronted with examples from German, Italian and Polish. Theoretical implications are considered. The constraint indicates that paradigms are organised, that Bybee's notion of autonomy is useful, and that non-affixal inflection is not a ragbag of isolated facts without theoretical interest.

Imperative and Control: First Person Imperatives in Norwegian

In Norwegian, the verb få ‘get, receive’ differs from all other verbs with respect to its use in imperative sentences and with respect to control properties in infinitival clauses. In the imperative, the deleted subject may be first person, and in clauses embedded after ‘ask’, få has unambiguous subject control. These syntactic facts are related to the lexical semantic properties of the verb få, and it is shown that this syntactic behavior is not due to some idiosyncratic peculiarity of this particular verb. The semantic properties of this and other Norwegian verbs account for the uniqueness of få in this respect.

Norwegian Verb Particle Constructions as Causative Constructions

In this article I argue that Taraldsen's (1983) analysis of verb particle constructions cannot be maintained because it predicts a considerable subset of the grammatical particle constructions to be ungrammatical, as well as some ungrammatical particle constructions to be grammatical. In my analysis of verb particle constructions as causative constructions, I borrow the device of reanalysis from Taraldsen. This reanalysis is crucially taken as a licensing condition for the rule of particle movement, but it does not constitute a sufficient condition for the possibility of particle movement, since I will also argue that this rule is subject to essentially non-syntactic restrictions so that its output cannot be wholly deduced from GB syntax subtheories.

Two Springar Dance Traditions from Western Norway

The springar dances are the oldest surviving couple dances in the fjord country of western Norway. Although currently performed by only a small segment (probably less than 1%) of the population in mostly rural areas, these dances have an intriguing history and an interesting position within modern Norwegian society. After an introduction to the springar genre, two contrasting springar traditions from the western districts of Hordaland and Sunnfjord are discussed, with some emphasis on the hardingfele (fiddle with sympathetic strings) music that accompanies these dances (see Remnant 1980: 158). The name springar (and the alternate names of springe dans, springe dantz,1 and springleik2) are derived from the Norwegian verb, springe (to spring or run lightly). Both meanings are appropriate to the quick and light manner in which the footwork of the springar dances is executed. The earliest known reference to a springar in Norway dates from 1646-predating the first mention of the waltz in that country (Matthus 1799) by some 150 years-in a dialect dictionary compiled in Askvoll, Sunnfjord by the parish priest Christen Jensson (1646). Jensson stated that the frampao (on-forward) was the local term for a springe dantz. Another dialect dictionary, compiled by B.C. de Fine in the western district of