Vortrag: Exploring apparent V2-violations in Norwegian

In this talk, I investigate apparent V2-violations in Norwegian, a North-Germanic V2 language. Examples of this phenomenon arise when the finite verb, which is assumed to have moved to the C-domain (Vikner and Schwartz 1996), and the pre-V2 constituent, are intervened. The intervening words are often adverbs, particularly so in subject-initial main clauses, as the example in (1) highlights. This results in unexpected V3 (or even V4) instances.

(1) Jeg bare lure-r på en liten ting. (Norwegian)
I just wonder-PRES on a small thing.
I am just wondering/I just wonder about a small something.’ (NoWaC SID 26597)

I used the NoWaC corpus to investigate adverb occurrences in apparent V2-violating contexts, ascertaining not only which adverbs arise, but also revealing that bare (‘just’) appears 5657 times. This accounts for 79% of all adverbs occurring between the pre-V2 constituent and the V2-verb. Furthermore I use the English-Norwegian translation corpus OMC (Oslo Multilingual Corpus) to explore the semantics of bare in these contexts, and I argue that they come about due to disambiguation (in conjunction with focus patterns).

In light of the data, the status of the left-field in Scandinavian and German is considered. Of particular relevance is the fact that nur (‘only’), a German equivalent for bare, cannot occur in these same contexts in subject-initial main clauses. I consider three syntactic approaches to modelling apparent V2-violations; external merge into the C-domain (Julien 2015:150-151), adverbial head-adjunction to the finite verb (Brandtler and Håkansson 2017:17), and phrasal movement approaches (Nilsen 2003:92, Lundquist 2018). I conclude that a phrasal movement approach containing the finite verb seems most appealing when modelling apparent V2-violations in Norwegian.

References:

Brandtler, Johan, and David Håkansson. 2017. V2 eller V3? Om preverbal placering av adverbial i svenskan. Norsk Lingvistisk Tidsskrift 35:11–26.

Julien, Marit. 2015. The force of V2 revisited. Journal of Comparative Germanic Linguistics 18:139–181.

Lundquist, 2018. Mer om de preverbala adverbialens syntax, semantik och prosodi. Norsk Lingvistisk Tidskrift 36:179-195.

Nilsen, Øystein. 2003. Eliminating positions: Syntax and semantics of sentence modification. Doctoral dissertation, Utrecht University.

NoWaC (Norwegian Web as Corpus).
https://www.hf.uio.no/iln/english/about/organization/text-laboratory/projects/nowac/index.html

Vikner, Sten, and Bonnie Schwartz. 1996. The verb always leaves IP in V2 clauses. In Parameters and functional heads, ed. by Adriana Belletti and Luigi Rizzi, 11–62. Oxford: Oxford University Press.