Detecting the Late Stages of Syntactic Change: The Loss of V-to-T in Faroese

Abstract

While all of the Scandinavian languages have verb-second order in main clauses, they vary in the word order in subordinate clauses: in Icelandic the finite verb appears in a high position, to the left of negation and sentence-medial adverbs, while in all of the standard Mainland Scandinavian languages it remains in a low position, to the right of these elements. This order in Mainland Scandinavian is known to be the result of a historical change, and has frequently been tied to the loss of agreement morphology. Faroese has been argued to be currently undergoing a change of the same type, but it has proved difficult to establish a sound empirical footing for the various claims about the syntax of this language. In this article we present data from three experimental investigations of acceptability, supplemented with a study of available texts, that show that the language is very close to completing the change in the loss of the high position for the verb, but that its syntax is still distinct in this respect from that of Danish, the mainland Scandinavian language with which it is in most contact. In addition to establishing a firmer empirical basis for theories of verb movement, our study also makes the methodological point that grammaticality-judgment tasks can yield extremely fine-grained results even in cases where variability is at issue.

Full NP Object Shift: The Old Norse Puzzle and the Faroese Puzzle revisited

“…; Heycock et al 2012; and references cited there), linguists have looked for explanations of this. Since Faroese syntax is in general not that different from Icelandic syntax, not even with respect to the famous V-to-I (or V-to-T) movement (see e.g.…”

Let us have articles betwixt us: Papers in Historical and Comparative Linguistics in Honour of Johanna L. Wood

“…In this contribution 1 , which is based on a hand-out from a course taught jointly with Johanna Wood since 2011, I will compare the approach to (English) clause structure taken by to the generative approach that Johanna and I (and many others) use in our teaching , Carnie 2013, Gelderen 2014) and in our research (Heycock & al. 2012, Wood & Vikner 2011, Wood 2002.…”

Den engelske verbalfrases omfang og struktur

“…Jeg vil her sammenligne tilgangen til engelsk saetningsstruktur i Hjulmand & Schwarz (2009 med den generative tilgang jeg selv bruger både i min undervisning (Haegeman & Guéron 1999, Carnie 2013) og i min forskning (Heycock & al. 2012, Vikner 1995, 1999, 2014a.…”

“…Hjulmand & Schwarz' (2009 analyse ligger også klart inden for den tradition der ofte kaldes Quirk-grammatikkerne, fx Quirk, Greenbaum, Leech & Svartvik (1985), Greenbaum & Quirk (1990) og Greenbaum (1996. Jeg vil her sammenligne tilgangen til engelsk saetningsstruktur i Hjulmand & Schwarz (2009 med den generative tilgang jeg selv bruger både i min undervisning (Haegeman & Guéron 1999, Carnie 2013) og i min forskning (Heycock & al. 2012, Vikner 1995, 1999, 2014a.…”

“…Den engelske verbalfrases omfang og struktur Sten Vikner Hjulmand & Schwarz (2009: 32, 2012 Heycock & al. 2012, Vikner 1995, 1999, 2015.…”