Hans-Olav Enger

University of Oslo · Department of Linguistics and Scandinavian Studies

In his excellent thesis from 2022, Adam Horn af Åminne discusses the reduction and loss of agreement for person and number in North Germanic in general, and in South-West Swedish dialects in particular. In this paper, I adhere to the tradition of doctoral thesis defences in Scandinavia, which is both to summarise the work and to question some of th...

Saami influence on Scandinavian grammar? Older histories of the Scandinavian languages (Danish, Swedish and Norwegian) commonly assume that German has influenced the Scandinavian languages heavily. By contrast, they do not assume any significant influence from the Saami languages. This traditional view has, however, been challenged in an interestin...

The article surveys the different types of adjective inflection: gradation and agreement. Agreement inflection on adjectives in Germanic can involve gender, number, case, and strong/weak (definiteness). The languages differ in their agreement inflection. The different modes of exponence for the different inflections are shown (e.g., periphrasis, af...

Inflection classes that have many members often gain members from classes that have fewer. While this tendency is often pointed out in diachronic linguistics, the American psycholinguist Charles Yang (2016) goes further. He claims this to be always the case, so that minority classes cannot be productive at the expense of majority classes, and that...

The paper presents examples of meta-morphomes (a kind of morphomic patterns, involving syncretisms) in North Germanic. There has been some debate over the notion of such patterns, and the aim is therefore to present relatively clear cases. Five cases are presented, involving inflection in verbs, nouns and adjectives. The syncretisms are all ‘unnatu...

The loss of inflectional categories is often thought of as a type of simplification. In this paper we present a survey of phenomena involving the reduction of adjective agreement in Scandinavian, using examples from Norwegian, and discuss their diachronic origins, including a new account of the development of indeclinability in adjectives such as k...

Artikkelen tar for seg spørsmålet om defektivitet i grammatiske mønstre er en absolutt egenskap i seg sjøl. Nærmere bestemt undersøker vi adjektiver som angivelig mangler nøytrumsform og adjektiver som angivelig er be-grensa til predikativ eller attributiv posisjon. Ved hjelp av data fra Leksiko-grafisk bokmålskorpus argumenterer vi for at det er m...

A classical topic in the syntax of the mainland Scandinavian languages is so-called pancake clauses where there seemingly is disagreement between the subject and the predicative adjective, as in Pannekaker er godt ‘Pancakes( f ): indf:pl be: prs good: n:sg ’; the subject is in the plural, whereas the predicative adjective is in the neuter singular....

There has been some debate over the notion of “morphomes”, i.e., patterns of inflection without any clear motivation outside of morphology. Morphomes are taken as evidence for some autonomy of morphology. However, it has been claimed that there is “very little evidence for change which operates on morphology alone”, in other words that morphology d...

With most studies on grammatical variation concentrating on the synchronic level, a systematic investigation of long-term grammatical variation within the context of language change, i.e. from a predominantly diachronic perspective, has largely remained a desideratum. The present volume fills this research gap by bringing together nine empirically...

Artikkelen handler om styrking og svekking av genussemantikk i skandinavisk, med hovedvekt på norsk. Det argumenteres for at både såkalt pannekakekongruens, som i setninger av typen Pannekaker er godt og Vodka er sunt på den ene sida, og innføring av anaforisk den på den andre, kan knyttes til styrking av trekk i det semantiske kjernesystemet for g...

The paper presents the approach referred to as the «No Blur Principle» (NBP), aka «Vocabular Clarity». This approach can account for an otherwise unexpected case of diachronic productivity in Faroese verb conjugation, viz. the spreading of the suffix -i in the present tense 3rd sg., not associated with the largest class. Even if the NBP is meant as...

This paper describes a marginal innovation in Norwegian Bokmål: Semantic (aka "referential") agreement seems to have become possible, for at least some writers, NP-internally. This is documented with web examples. Some younger speakers also confirm that the possibility exists for them. Parallels in French and Italian are pointed out. The developmen...

This paper deals with a classical problem in Scandinavian grammar, so-called ‘pancake sentences’, nicknamed after examples like Pannekaker er godt ‘Pancakes are good’ where there seemingly is disagreement between the plural subject and the predicative adjective in the neuter singular. Our aim is twofold. From the theoretical point of view, we shall...

The paper presents examples of inflection class reinforcement, where an inflection class becomes more different from its neighbours than it was. This is a manifestation of a diachronic tendency for more overt marking, similar to Kuryłowicz’ first law for analogy. It is also a manifestation of redundancy, which is characteristic of inflection. If in...

This paper defends the analysis of Scandinavian ‘pancake sentences’ as semantic or referential agreement (Enger 2004). Alternative analyses assuming that pancake sentences are to be analysed as syntactic agreement (Josefsson 2009), have some drawbacks. Notably, the distinction between different kinds of gender is not well motivated; the connection...

The No Blur Principle (NBP) or Vocabulary Clarity (VC) approach (Carstairs- McCarthy 1994, 2010) is a possible restriction on the behaviour of inflectional affixes (grammatical units), originally motivated by an analogy with words (lexical units). The restriction is grounded in synonymy avoidance, in the observation that "Every two forms contrast i...

Traditional views of inflectional changes often run as follows: A morphological opposition expressed by affixes is disturbed by sound changes. It is then left to morphology to ‘clean up the mess’; morphology is merely reactive. If, however, morphology can operate “by itself” (Aronoff 1994, Carstairs-McCarthy 1994, 2001, 2010, Maiden 2004, 2005), on...

In this paper, we try to see how insights from morphology and grammaticalisation can be combined. Two approaches to the semantics of inflectional affixes are contrasted. According to one, affixes have no meaning, according to another, affixes have meaning just like lexical items. Given insights from grammaticalisation, a middle way, associated with...

In some Norwegian dialects, such as older Oslo dialect, the noun mamma ‘mother’ unexpectedly appears to be masculine. The Nordreisa dialect (Northern Norwegian) goes one step further. The word looks like it is masculine, but only in the definite form. This is an unusual “split” because gender mixture is normally based on number, not definiteness (b...

The present paper investigates language change in the categories of Number, Gender, Case and Definiteness from the perspective of cognitive linguistics. On the basis of data from Germanic and Slavic, as well as from Greek, Breton, Spanish and Persian, it is claimed that the observed changes are constrained by the Animacy Hierarchy and what we call...

Traditionally, it has been claimed that contact leads to reduction, and this has been suggested to hold true also for Scandinavian. Indeed, it holds true both for lexical gender (section 2) and for declensions (section 5) in Norwegian. However, it is too simple to talk of the Scandinavian gender system in terms of reduction only (sections 3 and 4)....

norsk tillater konstruksjoner der modalverba ville, måtte, skulle, kunne og burde står som eneste verb med et retningsadverbial som utfylling, jf. han vil hjem nå. i denne artikkelen viser vi at selv om det er et nært forhold mellom denne konstruksjonen og den tilsvarende med et etterfølgende infinitt verb, som han vil dra hjem nå, er det klare for...

In cases of diachronic change, do lexemes shift inflection class gradually or in one leap? Evidence is presented from Norwegian verbs and nouns. These seem to behave somewhat differently: Verbs shift more gradually, nouns more abruptly. An alternative account for the verbs, presented by Kusters [Kusters, W., 2003. Linguistic Complexity: The Influen...

In the literature on gender assignment, some scholars claim that semantic assignment rules always win, others that there is no type-wise ranking (i.e., ranking according to whether the rules are semantic, morphological or phonological) at all. This discussion necessitates a further look at semantic assignment rules that have nothing to do with the...

  The No Blur Principle (NBP) is confronted with developments in Norwegian dialects. The NBP helps us explain why the suffixes of the most productive class do not become ‘super-stable’: that would have entailed a violation of the NBP. If affixes associated with the most productive class have become super-stable, something has been done with other s...

This paper is devoted to the historical origin of the definiteness suffix -de on a class of neuter nouns in the Northern Gudbrandsdalen dialect of Norwegian. Homonymy avoidance, which has previously been invoked, is argued to be irrelevant. Rather, the suffix has arisen through reanalysis in combination with analogy; it appears to be an example of...

This paper deals with Scandinavian sentences where the predicative adjective apparently disagrees with its subject, such as pannekaker er godt ‘pancakes-pl. is good-neut.sg.’, vodka er sunt ‘vodka-masc. is healthy-neut.sg.’. In this paper, the use of neuter in such sentences is seen as a case of semantic agreement. Thereby, pancake sentences comply...

This paper examines the relation between gender and declension in Norwegian. Traditionally, one has assumed that genders are the basis for predicting declensions in that language. More recently, it has been suggested that declensions are the basis for predicting genders — in all languages that have both. Diachronic data examined in this paper indic...

Starting out from observational gaps in the Norwegian verb inflection, a constraint is suggested on non-affixal inflection. A previous suggestion is shown not to suffice. A revised version, the Stem Alternation Constraint, is suggested. This constraint seems empirically adequate when confronted with examples from German, Italian and Polish. Theoret...

This paper shows that Cognitive Grammar is valuable for typological studies. The Norwegian and Russian reflexive-middle-passive systems are analysed comprehensively and compared. Whereas Cognitive Grammar is compatible with the typological tradition (represented by Kemmer), it needs amendment in certain important respects. The main theoretical cont...

Naturalness conflicts represent a problem for Natural Morphology, as no general principles are claimed to hold. In this field, Natural Morphology might try to draw on sociolinguistic findings. Different types of dialects may differ as to what constitutes a natural development. Morphological transparency is less important in more "peripheral" dialec...