Complexity Matters: On Gender Agreement in Heritage Scandinavian

Abstract

This paper investigates aspects of the noun phrase from a Scandinavian heritage language perspective, with an emphasis on noun phrase-internal gender agreement and noun declension. Our results are somewhat surprising compared with earlier research: We find that noun phrase-internal agreement for the most part is rather stable. To the extent that we find attrition, it affects agreement in the noun phrase, but not the declension of the noun. We discuss whether this means that gender is lost and has been reduced to a pure declension class, or whether gender is retained. We argue that gender is actually retained in these heritage speakers. One argument for this is that the speakers who lack agreement in complex noun phrases, have agreement intact in simpler phrases. We have thus found that the complexity of the noun phrase is crucial for some speakers. However, among the heritage speakers we also find considerable inter-individual variation, and different speakers can have partly different systems.

Grammatical Gender in American Norwegian Heritage Language: Stability or Attrition?

“…Since the definite suffix is sometimes considered to express gender, also in current work (e.g., Johannessen and Larsson, 2015 ), it is worth pausing to consider the evidence in favor of suffixes being declension class markers. This view is most prominently articulated by Lødrup ( 2011 ), based on a careful investigation of (a variety of) the Oslo dialect, where the feminine gender is argued to have been lost.…”

Stability and attrition in American Norwegian nominals: a view from predicate nouns

“…These studies take different positions. Johannessen and Larsson (2015) argue that gender as a grammatical category is retained but that in some speakers, gender agreement is vulnerable in complex constructions because of attrition. Lohndal and Westergaard (2016), on the other hand, argue that some speakers may lack gender completely.…”

“…Lohndal and Westergaard (2016), on the other hand, argue that some speakers may lack gender completely. Johannessen and Larsson (2015) and Lohndal and Westergaard (2016) use corpus data and focus on DP-internal gender marking; the different conclusions are, to a great extent, caused by different treatments of the definite suffix. 49 Rødvand (2017, 127, 130) to a greater extent includes experimental data; she concludes that the participants in her study (with one possible exception) have kept at least relics of the EurNo three-gender system.…”

Language Mixing and Diachronic Change: American Norwegian Noun Phrases Then and Now

“…Instead, gender is revealed by affixes and associated words. 13 Previous studies have documented and mapped the gender distribution of nouns in both non-heritage Norwegian [69] and in AmNo [6,[70][71][72][73]. Without going into the details of these studies, they all establish that masculine is the predominant gender of Norwegian nouns, accounting for 50% or more of nouns, whereas feminine and neuter each cover a smaller percentage, which may wary across different dialects.…”

“…However, as there is no clear developmental pattern or obvious diachronic change, the question of gender will not be discussed further in this article. [72,73]. 16 The numbers are based on tokens in the selection.…”