The constructions I investigate in this paper can all be subsumed under the heading ‘have-omission’. This is also the traditional analysis, to assume an omission of a semantically superfluous auxiliary in these structures. A different perspective however, and one that I will advocate here, is… read more
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… read more
This paper reports a case study of Mandarin-Norwegian bilingual boy born into a Mandarin-speaking immigrant family in Norway. Mandarin and Norwegian are typologically distinct languages and presumably have contradictory parameters in the domains of finiteness and word order, the focal areas of the… read more
In a corpus of more than 120 hours of recorded American Norwegian speech we find the word spost, which looks like a non-Norwegian item. This word appears to be in normal use, although Norwegian Americans deny using it. Apparently this is the modal structure ‘be supposed to’ / ‘I suppose’ being… read more
This paper describes how temporal chains are construed in a syntactic structure. The links in T-chains are local T-heads, where every main verb and auxiliary brings its own tense package. The semantic difference between finite and non-finite T-elements consists in the choice of first argument, the… read more
The lack of overt inflectional markings encoding finiteness is a crucial difference between Present Day English (PDE) and modern Mainland Scandinavian languages (MSc). In contrast to previous analyses, our approach considers finiteness a primitive distinction explicitly expressed in verbal forms… read more