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Germanic Heritage Languages in North America: Acquisition, attrition and change
Edited by Janne Bondi Johannessen † and Joseph C. Salmons
[Studies in Language Variation 18] 2015
► pp. 161–177

Hybrid Verb Forms in American Norwegian and the Analysis of the Syntactic Relation between the Verb and its Tense

English roots/stems that are nonce borrowed into American Norwegian regularly show Norwegian tense inflection. In this article, I use data of such hybrid verb forms as a starting-point for an investigation of the general theoretical analysis of the morpho-syntactic relation between a verbal stem and its tense affix. I argue that the hybrid verb forms in American Norwegian should be taken as evidence that it is not the case that verbs (and inflected words generally) are fully listed with inflectional features in the lexicon and subsequently checked for their inflectional features in the syntax (as suggested in recent minimalist analyses). Instead, I argue that what is contained in the lexicon are the bare verbal root or stems, and that tense morphology is syntactically assigned to the root/stem during the derivation.

Keywords: American Norwegian, borrowing, code-switching, language mixing, tense, verb movement
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at [email protected].

Published online: 20 August 2015
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/silv.18.07afa
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2019. Language mixing within verbs and nouns in American Norwegian. The Journal of Comparative Germanic Linguistics 22:2 ► pp. 189 ff. DOI logo
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