Nordic Atlas of Language Structures Journal

Argument placement in Icelandic

Ida Larsson — Tue, 17 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0100

This paper gives an overview of the Icelandic data in the Nordic Word Order Database (NWD; Lundquist et al. 2019). The data were collected from 30 native speakers of Icelandic, and the experimental task elicited argument placement (subject shift, object shift, long object shift, particle shift). The results confirm that subject shift of definite subjects and pronouns is produced categorically in Icelandic, as is pronominal object shift. With regard to the placement of non-pronominal objects relative sentence adverbials and particles, there is, on the other hand, variability. Rather surprisingly, the results suggest that the placement of subjects (initial or postverbal) influences non-pronominal object shift. With respect to the ordering of objects and particles, the distinction between directional and metaphorical particles is relevant. The patterns are partly different from what we find in the comparable data from the other North Germanic languages (also available in NWD).

Argument placement in Norwegian

Björn Lundquist, Eirik Tengesdal — Tue, 17 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0100

This paper gives an overview of the results from three data collection sessions that took place in Norway in 2018, which specifically targeted the placement of subjects, objects and particles in main clauses. The results reveal a fairly high amount of variation in the relative linear order of phrasal subjects and negation, and phrasal objects and verb particles, while the placement of pronouns show little or no variation. We view these results in a wider context of variation within the North Germanic languages, and furthermore explicitly describe the structure of the collected data, and how to access it in the online Nordic Word Order Database.

Argument placement in Swedish

Ida Larsson, Björn Lundquist — Tue, 17 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0100

This paper gives an overview of the Swedish data on argument placement in the Nordic Word Order Database (NWD; Lundquist et al. 2019). The data were collected from 54 native speakers in three different locations, and the experimental task elicited argument placement (subject shift, object shift, long object shift, particle shift). The results confirm that there is considerable inter- and intra-speaker variation in argument placement in Swedish, with the exception of the order between arguments and particles. Whereas subject shift appears to be obligatory with pronouns, there is variability in the placement of NP subjects, which cannot fully be explained with information structural factors. Long object shift is frequent with reflexives, whereas only a few speakers produce a small number of instances of long object shift with personal pronouns. Regular object shift is frequent, but not obligatory. We cannot observe any effects of dialect area or age in the dataset.

Argument placement in Danish

Ida Larsson, Eirik Tengesdal — Tue, 17 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0100

This paper gives an overview of the Danish data on argument placement in the Nordic Word Order Database (NWD, Lundquist et al. 2019). The data were collected from 28 speakers in Copenhagen and Fredriksværk in 2018. The experimental task elicited subject and object placement relative to adverbs and particles (i.e., subject shift, object shift and particle shift), as well as subject placement relative to objects (long object shift). The results confirm that there is considerably less variability in argument placement in Danish than in the other North Germanic languages.