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Article published In:
Syntactic Variation and Change
Edited by David Håkansson, Ida Larsson and Erik Magnusson Petzell
[Linguistic Variation 17:1] 2017
► pp. 8–43

Variation and change in Norwegian wh-questions

The role of the complementizer som

| UiT The Arctic University of Norway | NTNU – Norwegian University of Science and Technology
| UiT The Arctic University of Norway | Western Norway University of Applied Sciences
| UiT The Arctic University of Norway | NTNU – Norwegian University of Science and Technology

In this paper, we consider variation in Verb Second (V2) word order in wh-questions across Norwegian dialects by investigating data from the Nordic Syntax Database (NSD), which consists of acceptability judgments collected at more than 100 locations in Norway. We trace the geographical distribution of the two main variables: phrasal vs. monosyllabic wh-elements (the latter argued to be heads) and subject vs. non-subject questions. In subject questions, non-V2 is realized by inserting the complementizer som in second position instead of the verb. We also discuss the connection between non-V2 and the possibility of inserting the complementizer som under extraction of a wh-subject from an embedded clause, i.e. in that-trace contexts. Based on synchronic data, we propose a diachronic account of the geographical distribution and argue that the development from V2 to non-V2 has started in subject questions, thus allowing us to relate the loss of the V2 requirement to changes in the properties of the complementizer som.

Keywords: complementizer, diachrony, dialect syntax, Norwegian, subject questions, that-trace, variation, verb second, wh-questions, word order
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Background and previous research
  • 3.The data
    • 3.1Methodology
    • 3.2Non-V2 word order
    • 3.3Extraction
    • 3.4Intermediate summary
  • 4.A diachronic account of the synchronic variation
    • 4.1Theoretical preliminaries
    • 4.2Stage 0
    • 4.3Stage 1
    • 4.4Stage 2
    • 4.5Stage 3a
    • 4.6Stage 3b
    • 4.7Summary
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 29 June 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/lv.17.1.02wes
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