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Lecture: The distribution of anaphora in Norwegian

Based on norwegian speakers' own intuitions

Presenting the distribution of the four possible 3rd person singular anaphora in Norwegian, as judged by Norwegian speakers, compared to the theories of binding in norwegian by Daniel Büring (2005).

My thesis explores the usage of anaphora in Norwegian, where in the third person singular (excluding case and gender) there are four possible options: the personal pronouns “han/ho” and the reflexives “han/ho sjølv”, “seg” and “seg sjølv”. This contrasts with languages like English and German that only have two options, the personal pronouns “he/she” or “er/sie” and the reflexive “him-/herself” or “sich”. In this thesis the term “anaphor” is used about any pronoun that refers back to an antecedent (an NP with the same referent) in the same sentence. I am using Daniel Büring's (2005) principles of binding theory, and specifically his theories about Norwegian, as my reference, and comparing them to Norwegian speakers' own intuitions, as gathered from a survey.

I had three hypotheses before gathering my data. First, that the data would support Büring's theories. Second, that they would not, or only in part. And third, that there is dialectal variation. Here, of course, the third hypothesis could overlap with the first two.

The method I used to gather data was an online questionnaire containing different sentences including an anaphor, where the anaphor varied between the four possible options in 3rd person singular. The participants were asked to rate the sentences on a scale from 1 (not at all acceptable) to 5 (completely acceptable). I additionally asked the participants what county their dialect was from, including options for bidialectals and non-native speakers.

The results, from 113 respondents across the country, showed that a lot of the intuitions support Büring's theories of binding in norwegian, but some of the results differ from what one would expect. This is particularly true for the use of the anaphor “seg sjølv”, which seems to be accepted in more positions than expected based on Büring (2005). In terms of dialects, the dialects from western Norway are the ones that stood out from the rest of the country.

Info

Day: 2025-11-14
Start time: 11:30
Duration: 00:30
Room: M17.23
Track: Theoretical Linguistics
Language: en

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