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Part of
Word Order Change in Acquisition and Language Contact: Essays in honour of Ans van Kemenade
Edited by Bettelou Los and Pieter de Haan
[Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today 243] 2017
► pp. 35–56

Chapter 3
Word order and verb movement in Norwegian wh-questions

A comparison of production and judgment data

| UiT – The Arctic University of Norway

This paper compares production and judgment data collected from several North Norwegian dialects, focusing on word order variation in wh-questions (V2 vs. non-V2). The findings show that non-V2 is widespread in questions with monosyllabic wh-elements and also fully accepted in questions with phrasal wh-elements in language contact areas. Furthermore, the acceptability of non-V2 correlates with the complexity of the wh-element, confirming previous accounts of the historical development. Age differences suggest that this development is currently being reversed. However, there is a major discrepancy between the production and judgement data, in that non-V2 is hardly ever produced with complex wh-elements. The findings are discussed in relation to what frequencies in diachronic data can(not) reveal about the grammar that produced historical texts.

Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Background
  • 3. Word order in wh-questions in Northern Troms
  • 4.Research questions
  • 5.Participants and methodology
  • 6.Results
    • 6.1Acceptability judgments
    • 6.2Comparison with similar data from Southern Troms
    • 6.3 The effect of information structure
    • 6.4Semi-spontaneous production
    • 6.5Age differences
  • 7. Discussion
  • 8.Summary and conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 14 December 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/la.243.03wes
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