In this paper English and Norwegian are compared with respect to a range of syntactic constructions (negated clauses, negative inversion, polarity questions, declaratives, subjunctives, why-not- constructions and infinitives). The paper also discusses preterit-participle mix-ups in English and relates these to the behaviour of main verbs in the investigated constructions. It is argued that in both languages these constructions require either an explicitly encoded finiteness feature, or, for the second set of constructions, the explicitly encoded absence of such a feature. English auxiliaries and main verbs differ in their respective feature specifications as regards finiteness, hence main verbs are banned from many of the positions where auxiliaries appear, and vice versa. English main verbs are bereft of a productive morphologically expressed finiteness distinction (except for in a few, but frequent irregular main verbs distinguishing preterits from participles), whereas auxiliaries have and be exhibit full paradigms of finite and non-finite forms. The modals and auxiliary do, on the other hand, exist only as finite forms and are hence banned from positions where non-finiteness is explicitly required by a given syntactic operation or construction. Hence, the finiteness feature is unevenly distributed across verbs and auxiliaries in English, but evenly distributed in all verbal categories in Norwegian, where all main verbs, modals and auxiliaries have full paradigms of finite and non-finite forms. This state of events, it is claimed, gives rise to the observed parametric variation between the Norwegian and English verbal systems.
2014Separating tense and finiteness: Anchoring in Dravidian. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 32: 283-306.
Askedal, Jon Ole
1994Norwegian. In The Germanic Languages, Ekkehard König & Johan van der Auwera (eds), 219—270. London: Routledge.
Baker, Carl Lee
1991The syntax of English not: The limits of core grammar. Linguistic Inquiry 22: 387-429.
Becker, Misha
2002English has two copulas. In University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics: Current Work in Linguistics, Vol. 7.2, Elsi Kaiser (ed.), 1-27. Philadelphia PA: University of Pennsylvania.
Bianchi, Valentina
2003On finiteness as logophoric anchoring. In Temps et points de vue/Tense and Point of View, Jacqueline Guéron & Liliane Tasmovski (eds), 213-246. Nanterre: Université Paris X.
Bonet, Eulàlia
1991Morphology after Syntax: Pronominal Clitics in Romance Languages. PhD dissertation, MIT.
Carstairs-McCarthy, Andrew
1987Allomorphy in Inflection. London: Croom Helm.
Chomsky, Noam
1955The logical structure of linguistic theory. Ms, Harvard University. Revised 1956 version published in part by Plenum, New York, 1975; and University of Chicago Press, Chicago 1985.
Chomsky, Noam
1957Syntactic Structures. The Hague: Mouton.
Chomsky, Noam
1995The Minimalist Program. Cambridge MA: The MIT Press.
Comrie, Bernard
1985Tense. Cambridge: CUP.
Cobbett, William
1919The English Grammar of William Cobbett. Carefully revised and annotated by Alfred Ayres. New York NY: D. Appleton and Company.
Cormack, Anabel & Smith, Neil
1998Negation, polarity, and verb movement. In Working Papers in Linguistics 10: 285-322. London: Phonetics and Linguistics, University College London.
Cormack, Anabel & Smith, Neil
2000Head movement and negation in English. Transactions of the Philological Society 98(1): 49-85.
1999Charting the learning path: Cues to parameter setting. Linguistic Inquiry 30: 27-68.
Edwards, Viv
1993The grammar of Southern British English. In Real English: The Grammar of English Dialects in the British Isles, James Milroy & Lesley Milroy (eds), 214-235. London: Longman.
Eide, Kristin Melum
2002aNorwegian Modals. PhD dissertation, NTNU.
Eide, Kristin Melum
2002bAdjunction sites for negation in Norwegian: Modals and negation. Nordic Journal of Linguistics 25(2): 225-252.
Eide, Kristin Melum
2005Norwegian Modals [Studies in Generative Grammar 74]. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Eide, Kristin Melum
2007Finiteness and inflection. (Draft) Lingbuzz.
Eide, Kristin Melum
2008Finiteness in Norwegian, English, ... and Chinese? In Comparative Grammar and Language Acquisition in the Age of Globalization: Norwegian and Chinese, Tor A. Åfarli & Fufen Jin (eds). Trondheim: Tapir.
2009bFiniteness: The haves and the have-nots. In Advances in Comparative Germanic Syntax [Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today 141], Artemis Alexiadou, Jorge Hankamer, Thomas McFadden, Justin Nuger & Florian Schäfer (eds), 357–390. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Eide, Kristin Melum
2010Mood in Norwegian. In Mood in the Languages of Europe [Studies in Language Companion Series 120], Björn Rothstein & Rolf Thieroff (eds), 56–70. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Eiskovits, Edina
1987Variation in the lexical verb in inner-Sydney English. Australian Journal of Linguistics 7: 1-24.
Faarlund, Jan Terje, Lie, Svein & Vannebo, Kjell Ivar
2001Processability in Scandinavian second language acquisition. Studies in Second Language Acquisition 23(3): 389-416.
Gretsch, Petra & Perdue, Clive
2007Finiteness in first and second language acquisition. In Irina Nikolaeva (ed.) 432-484.
Guasti, Maria Teresa
2002Language Acquisition.The Growth of Grammar. Cambridge MA: The MIT Press.
Guéron, Jacqueline & Hoekstra, Teun
1995The temporal interpretation of predication. In Small Clauses. Syntax and Semantics, Anna Cardinaletti & Maria Teresa Guasti (eds), 77-107. New York NY: Academic Press.
Hagen, Jon Erik
2001Finittkategoriens kritiske karakter i norsk som andrespråk. In Andrespråk, tospråklighet, norsk, Anne Golden & Helene Uri (eds). Oslo: Unipub Forlag.
Haegeman, Liliane & Guéron, Jacqueline
1999English Grammar. A Generative Perspective. Oxford: Blackwell.
Halle, Moritz & Marantz, Alec
1993Distributed morphology and the pieces of inflection. In The View from Building 20. Essays in Linguistics in Honor of Sylvain Bromberger, Kenneth Hale & Samuel Jay Keyser (eds), 111-176. Cambridge MA: The MIT Press.
Harley, Heidi & Noyer, Rolf
1999Distributed morphology. GLOT International 4(4): 3-9.
Hasselgård, Hilde, Johansson, Stig & Lysvåg, Per
1998English Grammar: Theory and Use. Oslo: Universitetsforlaget.
Holmberg, Anders & Platzack, Christer
1995The Role of Inflection in Scandinavian Syntax. Oxford: OUP.
Holmberg, Anders & Roberts, Ian
2013The syntax-morphology relation. Lingua 130: 111-131.
Hopper, Paul J
1975The Syntax of the Simple Sentence in Proto-Germanic. The Hague: Mouton.
Jackendoff, Ray
1972Semantic Interpretation in Generative Grammar. Cambridge MA: The MIT Press.
Laka, Itziar
1990Negation in Syntax: On the Nature of Functional Categories and Projections. PhD dissertation, MIT. Published as On the Syntax of Negation, 1994, New York NY: Garland.
Langacker, Ronald W
1978The form and meaning of the English Auxiliary. Language 54: 853-882.
Lasnik, Howard
1981Restricting the theory of transformations: A case study. In Explanations in Linguistics, Norbert Hornstein & David Lightfoot (eds), 152-173. London: Longman.
Lasnik, Howard
1995Verbal morphology: Syntactic structures meets the Minimalist Program. In Evolution and Revolution in Linguistic Theory: Essays in Honor of Carlos Otero, Héctor Campos & Paula Kempchinsky (eds), 251-275. Washington DC: Georgetown University Press.
Lasnik, Howard
1999Minimalist Analysis. Oxford: Blackwell.
Lasnik, Howard
2000Syntactic Structures Revisited. Contemporary Lectures on Classic Transformational Theory. Cambridge MA: The MIT Press
Lasser, Ingeborg
1997Finiteness in Adult and Child German [MPI Series in Psycholinguistics 8]. Wageningen: Ponsen and Looijen.
Lightfoot, David
1999The Development of Language: Acquisition, Change, and Evolution. Oxford: Blackwell.
Lightfoot, David
2006How New Languages Emerge. Cambridge: CUP.
McCarthy, John J. & Prince, Alan
1999Faithfulness and identity in prosodic morphology. In The Prosody Morphology Interface, René Kager, Harry van der Hulst & Wim Zonneveld (eds), 218–309. Cambridge:CUP. Downloaded ROA: [URL]> DOI:
McWhorter, John
2005Defining Creole. Oxford: OUP.
McWhorter, John
2009What else happened to English? A brief for the Celtic hypothesis. English Language and Linguistics 13: 163-191.
Muysken, Pieter & Law, Paul
2001Creole Studies. A theoretical linguist’s field guide. GLOT International 5(2): 47-57.
Næss, Stine M
2006Kan han snakker norsk? En generativ analyse av ja/nei-spørsmål i norsk som andrespråk (Can he Speak Norwegian? A Generative Analysis of Polarity Questions in Norwegian as a Second Language). MA thesis, NTNU.
Palmer, Frank R
1986Mood and Modality. Cambridge: CUP.
Pinker, Steven
1994The Language Instinct. The New Science of Language and Mind. London: Penguin Books.
Pinker, Steven
2000Words and Rules. The Ingredients of Language. London: Phoenix.
Platzack, Christer & Rosengren, Inger
1998On the subject of imperatives: A minimalist account of the imperative clause. The Journal of Comparative Linguistics 1: 177-224.
Pollock, Jean-Yves
1989Verb Movement, UG and the Structure of IP. Linguistic Inquiry 20: 365-424.
Reuland, Eric & Reinhart, Tania
1995Pronouns, anaphors and case. In Studies in Comparative Germanic Syntax, Hubert Haider, Susan Olsen & Sten Vikner (eds), 241 269. Dordrecht: Kluwer.
Rice, Curt
2003Dialectal variation in Norwegian imperatives. Nordlyd 31(2): 372-384.
Ritter, Elizabeth & Wiltschko, Martina
2005Anchoring Events to Utterances without Tense. WCFLL 2005 <[URL]
Ritter, Elizabeth & Wiltschko, Martina
2009Varieties of INFL: TENSE, LOCATION and PERSON. In Alternatives to Cartography, Jeroen van Craenenbroeck (ed.), 153-201. Berlin: De Gruyter.
Ritter, Elizabeth & Wiltschko, Martina
2014The composition of INFL. An exploration of tense, tenseless languages, and tenseless constructions. Natural Language and linguistic Theory 32: 1331-1386.
Rizzi, Luigi
1990On the anaphor agreement effect. Rivista di Linguistica 2: 27-42.
Rizzi, Luigi
1996Residual verb second and the wh-criterion. In Parameters and Functional Heads, Adriana Belletti & Luigi Rizzi (eds), 63-90. Oxford: OUP.
Roberts, Ian
1985Agreement parameters and the development of English modal auxiliaries. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 3: 21-58.
Roberts, Ian
1993Verbs and Diachronic Syntax. Dordrecht: Kluwer.
Roberts, Ian
1998Have/be raising, Move F, and procrastinate. Linguistic Inquiry 29: 113-125.
1969Auxiliaries as main verbs. In Studies in Philosophical Linguistics, William Todd (ed.), 77-102. Evanston IL: Great Expectations.
Sampson, Geoffrey
2002Regional variation in the English verb qualifier system. English Language and Linguistics 6: 17–30.
Sauerland, Uli
1996The late insertion of Germanic inflection. Ms, second draft, MIT.
Schütze, Carson T
2003When is a verb not a verb? In
Proceedings of the 19th Scandinavian Conference on Linguistics
, Anne Dahl, Kristine Bentzen & Peter Svenonius (eds). Nordlyd 31(2): 400-415.
Schütze, Carson T
2004Synchronic and diachronic microvariation in English do. Lingua 114(4): 495-516.
Sigurðsson, Halldór Á
2004The syntax of person, tense, and speech features. Italian Journal of Linguistics 16: 219-251.
Slobin, Dan
1982Universal and particular in the development of language. In Language Acquisition: The State of the Art, Eric Wanner & Lila Gleitman (eds), 128-172. Cambridge: CUP.
Solà, Jaume
1996Morphology and word order in Germanic languages. In Minimal Ideas. Syntactic Studies in the Minimalist Framework, Werner Abraham, Samuel David Epstein, Höskuldur Thráinsson & C. Jan-Wouter Zwart (eds), 217-251. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Trudgill, Peter
1999Standard English: What it isn’t. In Standard English: The Widening Debate, Tony Bex & Richard J. Watts (eds), 117-128. London: Routledge.
Trudgill, Peter
2000Sociolinguistics. An Introduction to Language and Society, 4th edn. London: Penguin.
Trudgill Peter & Chambers, Jack K
(eds)1991Dialects of English: Studies in Grammatical Variation. London: Longman.
Warner, Anthony R
1985The Structuring of English Auxiliaries: A Phrase Structure Grammar. Bloomington IN: IULC.
Wexler, Kenneth
1998.Very early parameter setting and the unique checking constraint: a new explanation of the optional infinitive stage. Lingua 106: 23-79
Wik, Marte Aakre
2014Om tempus og finitthet i norsk som andrespråk (On Tense and Finiteness in Norwegian as a Second Language). MA thesis, NTNU.
Woolford, Ellen
1999More on the anaphor agreement effect. Linguistic Inquiry 30: 257-287.
Wunderlich, Dieter
1995Minimalist morphology: The role of paradigms. In Yearbook of Morphology, Geert Booij & Jaap van Marle (eds), 93-114. Dordrecht: Kluwer.
Wunderlich, Dieter & Fabri, Ray
1994Minimalist morphology. Ms, University of Düsseldorf.
Zanuttini, Raffaella
1996On the relevance of tense for sentential negation. In Parameters and Functional Heads: Essays in Comparative Syntax, Adriana Belletti & Luigi Rizzi (eds), 181-207. Oxford: OUP.
Zubizarreta, Maria Luisa
1982On the Relationship of the Lexicon to Syntax. PhD dissertation, MIT.
Cited by
Cited by 4 other publications
Eide, Kristin Melum
2020. Tense and Aspect in Germanic Languages. In The Cambridge Handbook of Germanic Linguistics, ► pp. 591 ff.
2016. Prescriptive infinitives in the modern North Germanic languages: An ancient phenomenon in child-directed speech. Nordic Journal of Linguistics 39:3 ► pp. 231 ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 21 april 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
Any errors therein should be reported to them.