Hasil untuk "North Germanic. Scandinavian"

Bjarne Simmelkjær Sandgaard Hansen

AbstractThe Scanian dialect of Middle Danish underwent a range of changes and reductions in its case system. I argue that these changes were caused neither by phonological developments nor by language contact as often assumed, but by multiple processes of grammaticalisation. The present paper focuses on one of these factors: that the relatively predictable constituent order within the Middle Danish noun phrase made case marking redundant in its function of marking noun-phrase internal agreement between head and modifier(s). This redundancy caused the case system to undergo a regrammation where the indexical sign relations changed so that the expression of morphological case no longer indicated this noun-phrase-internal agreement, leaving only topology (as well as morphologically marked number and gender agreement) as markers of this type of agreement. This factor contributed to the subsequent degrammation of the entire case system.

Marc van Oostendorp

Eric Haeberli

Laura Zieseler

Reidar J. Mykletun

Stefanie Von Schnurbein

Ida Larsson, Sofia Tingsell, Maia Andréasson

This chapter surveys variation and change in Swedish spoken in America. We compare data from a corpus of American Swedish collected in Minnesota 2011 with material collected in the 1960s. Linguistic change in American Swedish can partly be accounted for in terms of koinéization. Marked dialect features seem to have disappeared quickly from American Swedish, but we can also observe dialect mixing and simplifications in, e.g., the pronominal system. At the same time, Swedish has been lost in the public domain, and there is considerable variation between speakers even with the same dialect background. It can also be noted that some speakers (even those that have Swedish as a first language) now have linguistic features that are otherwise typical of second language learners. We attribute this to the loss of Swedish-speaking communities, but view it as features of language learning rather than attrition. The paper concludes that it is mainly in the lexicon that American Swedish stands out. This variety of Swedish has its roots in a koiné situation of speakers of different Swedish dialects living together, but also includes language-contact traits from English

Shane McLeod

George Walkden

Abstract This chapter discusses the occurrence of null arguments in early Germanic. In 5.2 it presents data on the occurrence of null arguments from five key early Germanic languages, including new quantitative studies of Gothic, Old Norse, Old English, and Old Saxon. Section 5.3 analyses these data within a generative framework, assessing the applicability of different theories. It argues that the theory of identification of null subjects by rich verbal agreement is not sufficient to explain the range of null arguments attested in early Germanic; a topic-drop analysis is also ruled out. It is argued the early Northwest Germanic languages were ‘partial’ null argument languages. In 5.4 these languages are looked at from a diachronic perspective, and it is argued that the restriction to main clauses found in Northwest Germanic is an innovation, and that we can tentatively reconstruct Proto-Germanic (like Gothic) as a canonical null subject language.

Viktor Lewizkij

Anatoly Liberman

Matsuji Tajima

Douglass C. North

Péter Pátrovics

Joseph B. Voyles