90 research outputs found

    Jan Terje Faarlund: The Syntax of Mainland Scandinavian

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    With the publication of this book, Jan Terje Faarlund, professor emeritus of Scandinavian Linguistics at the University of Oslo, makes a comparative overview of Danish, Norwegian and Swedish available to linguists who are unable to read these languages. I believe this is the first book of its kind. To find a similar attempt we have to go back to the 1940s when Lage Hulthén published his comprehensive comparison of the syntax of Nordic languages, see Hulthén (1944, 1947). Hulthén’s study is however written in Swedish and is based on written sources mainly from the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th. The main sources for Faarlund’s book are the three reference grammars published in Norwegian, Swedish and Danish between 1997 and 2011: Norsk referansegrammatikk (Faarlund, Lie & Vannebo, 1997, abbreviated NRG), Svenska Akademiens grammatik (Teleman, Hellberg & Andersson 1999, abbreviated SAG) and Grammatik over det Danske Sprog (Hansen & Heltoft 2011, abbreviated GDS). These grammars are accessible to linguists who speak any one of the described languages, whereas the primary intended readership for Faarlund’s new book is presumably the linguistic community outside Scandinavia. This is also the reason why this review is written in English

    Absolut superlativ i samtida sprĂĄkbruk

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    In this article we report on a corpus study of elative superlatives in contemporary Swedish. Elative superlatives differ from ordinary superlatives in that no direct comparison with other referents is involved. Instead a referent is said to have the property expressed by the adjective to a very high degree. In Swedish, elative superlatives are formally distinct from ordinary superlatives (they lack the post-nominal clitic article) which means that they can be found in corpus searches. We show that elative superlatives have expressive function and are typically used in emphatic assertions which are intended to make the strongest possible claim in a given situation. Elative superlatives are used in all grammatical functions but with slightly different implicational properties. Contrary to what has been assumed, elative superlatives are not limited to fixed expressions and formal written language. Creative uses abound in blog texts and sports commentaries.http://eecoppock.info/Engdahl+Coppock.pdfhttp://eecoppock.info/Engdahl+Coppock.pdfhttp://eecoppock.info/Engdahl+Coppock.pdfPublished versio

    SUBJECT AND OBJECT POSITIONS IN SWEDISH

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    The issue of how to analyse so-called verb second languages has received a lot of attention in the recent theoretical literature. In most approaches, the analysis relies heavily on structure for the explanation of the word order phenomena. Starting with den Besten (1983), the finite verb is assumed to head a functional projection, whose specifier position provides the landing site for th
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