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Reorganising Grammatical Variation: Diachronic studies in the retention, redistribution and refunctionalisation of linguistic variants
Edited by Antje Dammel, Matthias Eitelmann and Mirjam Schmuck
[Studies in Language Companion Series 203] 2018
► pp. 209–230

Making sense of grammatical variation in Norwegian

| University of Oslo
| Volda University College
| University of Oslo

This study examines two examples of grammatical variation in Norwegian inflection, strong versus weak verb conjugation and affixal versus periphrastic adjective comparison. The main claim is that the choice of variants is not as arbitrary as one may think, which rather indicates a division of labour. The strong verb inflection tends to be motivated not only by phonology, but also by semantics. The affixal and periphrastic adjective comparisons tend to be used with different sets of adjectives and for different semantic purposes. These observations support the Principle of Contrast, the idea that a difference in form normally relates to a difference in meaning.

Keywords: inflection, semantics, verb conjugation, adjective comparison, Principle of Contrast
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Verb conjugations
    • 2.1Introducing the data – and the issue
    • 2.2The link with semantics
    • 2.3Supporting evidence
    • 2.4Summarising Section 2
  • 3.Comparative constructions
    • 3.1The issue
    • 3.2Meta-comparison
    • 3.3A warning against introspection
    • 3.4A comparison with two other studies on comparison
  • 4.Conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 24 October 2018
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https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.203.08sam
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