The Norwegian Nominal System

This study presents a unified, economic account of the intricate relationship between form, meaning and interpretation in the Norwegian nominal system – without reference to polysemy. It covers all kinds of nominal signs, i.e. nouns, adjectives, pronouns and determiners, as well as the conventionalised syntactic combinations between them. Among its central innovations is the introduction of the feature general number into Norwegian morphology.

This study presents a unified, economic account of the intricate relationship between form, meaning and interpretation in the Norwegian nominal system – without reference to polysemy. It covers all kinds of nominal signs, i.e. nouns, adjectives, pronouns and determiners, as well as the conventionalised syntactic combinations between them. Among its central innovations is the introduction of the feature general number into Norwegian morphology.

How does one speak about kinds in Norwegian? Which noun form should one use to say that dogs bark and cows are mammals? And is it always necessary to use a plural noun form to express genericity? The study presented in this book shows a cognitive approach to genericity in Norwegian. The study material includes three data sets—two surveys and a specialised corpus of generic texts. Both the surveys and the corpus were analysed in two ways—with the use of chosen cognitive models and with a number of statistical tests. Applying both qualitative and quantitive methods has allowed to conduct a comprehensive study on genericity in Norwegian. „The study of Anna Kurek-Przybilski is a comprehensive analysis of genericity in Norwegian. The cognitive approach of the project is combined with other analysis models and the results of statistical tests. The cognitive perspective on generics proposed (and conducted) in the project allows for an interesting analysis of language data, which is additionally supported by the statistical analyses. The study conducted in the project is based on a comprehensive data set. An advantage of the study is that the chosen data focuses on the actual language use and language intuitions, collected through surveys and provided by carefully chosen respondents—native speakers of Norwegian. Moreover, the analyses were based on a set of generic texts chosen particularly for this purpose. The specialised corpus created by the Author was very deliberate, both in terms of text genres (encyclopaedic texts) and the classification of the texts. As a result, the Author was able to use the models proposed by Radden and Radden and Driven, and develop them further to suit the Norwegian language, taking into account its specificity.” From the review by Prof. Agnieszka Gicala

OECD's 2012 Economic Survey of Norway examines recent economic developments, policies and prospects, and includes more detailed analyses of value for money in public spending and capital tax reform.

This book explores the syntactic structures of Mainland Scandinavian, a term that covers the Northern Germanic languages spoken in Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and parts of Finland. The continuum of mutually intelligible standard languages, regional varieties, and dialects stretching from southern Jutland to eastern Finland share many syntactic patterns and features, but also present interesting syntactic differences. In this volume, Jan Terje Faarlund discusses the main syntactic features of the national languages, alongside the most widespread or typologically interesting features of the non-standard varieties. Each topic is illustrated with examples drawn from reference grammars, research literature, corpora of various sorts, and the author's own research. The framework is current generative grammar, but the volume is descriptive in nature, with technical formalities and theoretical discussion kept to a minimum. It will hence be a valuable reference for students and researchers working on any Scandinavian language, as well as for syntacticians and typologists interested in Scandinavian facts and data without necessarily being able to read Scandinavian.

This monograph presents a new model of the internal syntax of nominal phrases. The model is mainly based on Scandinavian, since with the wide range of variation that Scandinavian displays in the nominal domain, despite the close genetic relationship between the different varieties, Scandinavian is particularly well-suited for explorations into nominal syntax. Among the topics covered are the basic syntactic structure of nominal phrases, definiteness, adjective phrases, possessors, relative clauses, and nominal predicates. The model is however meant to be a tool for analysing the nominal phrases of any language. While the base-generated structure is taken to be universally uniform, the model allows for variation in the feature makeup of individual elements, in the phonological realisation of the features, and in the movements that may or may not apply. Hence, as shown in the final chapter, patterns found in languages outside of Scandinavian can also be accounted for within the model.

This volume collects novel contributions to comparative generative linguistics that “rethink” existing approaches to an extensive range of phenomena, domains, and architectural questions in linguistic theory. At the heart of the contributions is the tension between descriptive and explanatory adequacy which has long animated generative linguistics and which continues to grow thanks to the increasing amount and diversity of data available to us. The chapters address research questions in comparative morphosyntax, including the modelling of syntactic categories, relative clauses, and demonstrative systems. Many of these contributions show the influence of research by Ian Roberts and collaborators and give the reader a sense of the lively nature of current discussion of topics in morphosyntax and morphosyntactic variation.

In this volume, the results of a number of empirical studies of the development of narrative construction within a multilingual context are presented and discussed. It is explored what operating principles underlie the process of narrative production in L1 and L2. Developmental relations between form and function will be studied across a broad range of functional categories, such as temporality, perspective, connectivity, and narrative coherence. Moreover, a variety of language contact situations is considered with broad variation in the typological distances between the languages in order to enable cross-linguistic comparison. The analysis of learner data in various cross-linguistic settings may thus offer new information on the role of the structural properties of unrelated languages on the process of narrative acquisition. In the present volume, an attempt is also made to find out how transfer from one language to the other is facilitated. Finally, the effects of input on narrative construction in children's first and second language are examined in several studies.