New Trends in Nordic and General Linguistics

Contents Martin Hilpert, Michael Rießler, Jan-Ola Östman, Christine Mertzlufft, Janet Duke Introducing new trends in Nordic linguistic research | 1 Section 1: Language contact Kurt Braunmüller Competing tendencies in Germanic pronominal and deictic systems: The most general principle will prevail | 11 Pavel Iosad “Pitch accent” and prosodic structure in Scottish Gaelic: Reassessing the role of contact | 28 Ari Páll Kristinsson and Amanda Hilmarsson-Dunn Implications of language contact: Evaluating the appropriateness of borrowings in written Icelandic | 55 John Weinstock At the frontier: Sámi linguistics gets a boost from outside | 68 Section 2: Phonology Natalia Kuznetsova Two phonological rarities in Ingrian dialects | 91 Kristján Árnason Analysing phonological variation in Faroese | 118 Section 3: Morphosyntax Jeremy Bradley Mari converb constructions – Interpretation and translation | 141 Ulla Stroh-Wollin Han and hon – Anaphoric pronouns in Early Scandinavia | 162 VI Contents Margrét Jónsdóttir From accusative to dative (via nominative): The case of fjölga ‘increase’ and fækka ‘decrease’ in Icelandic | 181 Section 4: Syntax Karl Erland Gadelii A generative interpretation of Diderichsen’s positional grammar | 205 Henrik Rosenkvist Evidence for a syntactic Parameter at work in Övdalian | 224 Ida Larsson and Janne Bondi Johannessen Embedded word order in Heritage Scandinavian | 239 Section 5: Grammaticalization Andres Karjus Through the spyglass of synchrony: Grammaticalization of the exterior space in the Eastern Circum-Baltic | 267 Helle Metslang, Karl Pajusalu and Külli Habicht Conjunctive markers of polar questions in Estonian | 283 Index | 307 Martin Hilpert, Michael Rießler, Jan-Ola Östman, Christine Mertzlufft, and Janet Duke Introducing new trends in Nordic linguistic research 1 A fresh start This book started with the idea of reviving a broken tradition. The conference series International Conference of Nordic and General Linguistics (ICNGL) had been organized at regular intervals between 1969 and 1998, but had disappeared from the linguistics conference circuit. The conference series had served as a common forum for linguists from the Nordic countries and international linguists working on Nordic languages, while at the same time being open to general linguistics, practiced by anyone, on any topic. Eliasson (2010) chronicles the conference series and contextualizes it in the research landscape of Nordic linguistics. To us, the editors of this book, the concept of this conference series was too attractive to be simply dropped; we thought it a worthwhile endeavor to re-invigorate the tradition, thereby creating a space for a community of researchers with a common, explicit or implicit interest in the Nordic languages, but with a wide spectrum of theoretical and methodological approaches, and without any restriction to a closed set of languages to be investigated. What we had in mind was as much a reconnection with the past as also a forward-looking enterprise. We wanted to see what issues were currently being worked on in the Nordic linguistics community in order to get a sense of the direction in which Nordic linguistics is moving. We also aimed for a broad interpretation of the adjective Nordic, including not only the languages of Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden, but also those of Greenland, the Faroe Islands, Åland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Russia, and other countries around the North Sea, the Baltic Sea, and the Barents Sea. Given that the ICNGL conference had been organized outside the Nordic countries before (Austin, TX in 1976), it seemed not too much of a stretch to re-start the tradition in Freiburg, in the southwest of Germany. In 2012 then, it was time for a fresh start. With due permission from the Nordic Association of Linguists (NAL), the 11th International Conference of Nordic and General Linguistics (ICNGL11) was organized at the University of Freiburg (Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg) by the editors of this book together with Peter Auer, the then-director of the linguistics section of the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies (FRIAS), and our conference secretary Elizabeth Zima and Martin Hilpert, Michael Rießler, Jan-Ola Östman, Christine Mertzlufft, and Janet Duke Introducing new trends in Nordic linguistic research 1 A fresh start This book started with the idea of reviving a broken tradition. The conference series International Conference of Nordic and General Linguistics (ICNGL) had been organized at regular intervals between 1969 and 1998, but had disappeared from the linguistics conference circuit. The conference series had served as a common forum for linguists from the Nordic countries and international linguists working on Nordic languages, while at the same time being open to general linguistics, practiced by anyone, on any topic. Eliasson (2010) chronicles the conference series and contextualizes it in the research landscape of Nordic linguistics. To us, the editors of this book, the concept of this conference series was too attractive to be simply dropped; we thought it a worthwhile endeavor to re-invigorate the tradition, thereby creating a space for a community of researchers with a common, explicit or implicit interest in the Nordic languages, but with a wide spectrum of theoretical and methodological approaches, and without any restriction to a closed set of languages to be investigated. What we had in mind was as much a reconnection with the past as also a forward-looking enterprise. We wanted to see what issues were currently being worked on in the Nordic linguistics community in order to get a sense of the direction in which Nordic linguistics is moving. We also aimed for a broad interpretation of the adjective Nordic, including not only the languages of Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden, but also those of Greenland, the Faroe Islands, Åland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Russia, and other countries around the North Sea, the Baltic Sea, and the Barents Sea. Given that the ICNGL conference had been organized outside the Nordic countries before (Austin, TX in 1976), it seemed not too much of a stretch to re-start the tradition in Freiburg, in the southwest of Germany. In 2012 then, it was time for a fresh start. With due permission from the Nordic Association of Linguists (NAL), the 11th International Conference of Nordic and General Linguistics (ICNGL11) was organized at the University of Freiburg (Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg) by the editors of this book together with Peter Auer, the then-director of the linguistics section of the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies (FRIAS), and our conference secretary Elizabeth Zima and 2 Martin Hilpert, Michael Rießler, Jan-Ola Östman, Christine Mertzlufft, and Janet Duke conference assistant Diane Zille. We were further helped by the members of the advisory board of the conference, Jan Anward, Kurt Braunmüller, Tove Bull, Östen Dahl, Stig Eliasson, Johanna Laakso, and Damaris Nübling. An important sponsor that helped us transform our idea into an actual event was the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG). Nordic and linguistics scholars and students alike in Freiburg gladly offered their assistance at the conference site. And for the practical preparation of this volume we have been assisted by Iris Perkmann. But the administrative side of a conference is merely a facilitator for the real thing. The success of a conference is measured by its academic man- and womanpower, by those who attend and present new research results. By the testimony of those who were present, the conference was a great success and we were pleased to see that our sense of what the field needs was indeed shared by the linguistics community at large. The conference drew a large number of participants from the Nordic countries as well as from other parts of the world, and there were 90 academic presentations altogether at the conference. Among the presentations were six invited plenary talks, by Lars-Olof Delsing, Frans Gregersen, Auli Hakulinen, Martin Hilpert, Anneli Sarhimaa, and Sarah Thomason. Overall, the topics of discussion showed a strong focus on Nordic linguistics, but there were presentations on a good many other languages as well. Making a point of going outside of the Nordic countries to engage practitioners of Nordic and general linguistics more broadly proved to be a very welcomed and appreciated step. In fact, the success of the conference was so overwhelming that it was decided to continue the conference series further. The twelfth conference in the series will thus be organized in Helsinki in 2016. 2 The volume The contributions in this volume have been selected from among the presentations given at that conference. They have gone through the process of external peer reviewing, and we can only regret that we were not able to include more of the papers that were submitted to us after the conference. The contents of the book mirror the diversity that we experienced at the conference, and that characterizes Nordic linguistics in the early twenty-first century. In fact, the very notion of diversity is, and has always been, at the center of Nordic linguistic research, both with respect to empirical data and with respect to the many-foldedness of the theoretical and methodological approaches that are practiced side by side. In this volume, analyses of phonological, morphological, and syntactic phenomena are found next to studies on language variation and change, language contact, grammaticalization, and typological comparisons. The reader is taken Introducing new trends in Nordic linguistic research 3 all around the Baltic Sea, into Russia, to Iceland and the Faroe Islands, and even to speakers of Heritage Scandinavian in North America. Nonetheless, in this set of contributions there are recurring common threads that represent issues that have also in the past informed Nordic linguistics. Several chapters in the volume deal with the conditions and consequences of language contact, other chapters reflect on the social forces that shape linguistic variation, and others still take language diachrony into account in their explanation of synchronic phenomena. The studies in this volume reflect the topics and theories that are traditionally associated with Nordic linguistics, while at the same time pointing the way towards new developments. We find papers both in the traditional Nordic temperament, like studies in the spirit of Diderichsen and in traditional structuralist approaches of various kinds, as well as papers in frameworks like generative minimalism. We invite readers to sample the offerings of this volume and to discover a tradition that is not only very much alive, but that is eager to move on. 3 The contributions The volume is structured into five sets of chapters that reflect different thematic foci. The first and largest group of studies is dedicated to language contact, which was the central conference theme for ICNGL11. The chapters that follow are ordered in accordance with the levels of linguistic structure that are addressed: phonology, morphosyntax, and syntax, respectively. The volume is concluded with a number of chapters addressing processes of grammaticalization. Each set of approaches has contributions on a variety of different languages, illustrating how common points of interest reach across linguistic and political boundaries. 3.1 Language contact The opening contribution by Kurt Braunmüller compares the pronominal systems of old Germanic languages with the aim to study the possible consequences of language contact, notably simplification, increase of semantic transparency, and the loss of equivalent and hence ‘superfluous’ forms. The specific case studies that inform the discussion include the integration of Scandinavian third person plural pronouns into the Old English pronominal system, enclitic definite marking in Norwegian and Swedish, and the shift in Mainland Scandinavian from definite articles beginning in h- to definite articles beginning in d-. The chapter concludes by suggesting that grammatical terminology can be 4 Martin Hilpert, Michael Rießler, Jan-Ola Östman, Christine Mertzlufft, and Janet Duke fruitfully reconsidered if the perspective of the second language learner is taken into account. The project of ‘rethinking grammar from an L2-perspective’ has profound consequences for grammar writing, as it breaks away from what Braunmüller characterizes as a fossilized view of grammar that is based on the categories of Classical Latin and Greek. Pavel Iosad addresses pitch accent and prosodic structure in Scottish Gaelic, which shows intriguing parallels to pitch accent contrasts in Swedish and Norwegian, and which thereby provokes the question of whether language contact had a role to play in the emergence of this phenomenon. Using criteria set forth in Thomason (2001), the paper reviews the evidence for and against a common origin, ultimately arguing in favor of parallel developments in Scottish Gaelic and North Germanic, as opposed to an explanation in terms of language contact. This interpretation is supported by the observation that pitch accent can be seen as the outcome of prosodic patterns that are independently attested in various branches of Celtic, not all of which were in contact with North Germanic. Ari Páll Kristinsson and Amanda Hilmarsson-Dunn study Icelandic speakers’ attitudes towards borrowings, examining the effects of age, profession, and text genre. While speakers of Icelandic are commonly reputed to harbor a certain linguistic conservatism, the results of this study suggest a more differentiated picture. Whereas speakers of all age groups view texts with borrowings as inappropriate in formal prestigious genres, the same speakers find them appropriate for genres of electronically mediated communication. That is, sensitivity to genre conventions is shown to be a more reliable explanation for the informants’ behavior than what has traditionally been characterized as a general ideology against borrowed items in Icelandic. The authors further show that exposure to different genres leads to different attitudes in younger speakers than in older speakers. John Weinstock broadens the discussion of language contact towards prehistoric developments, offering a reflection on the early development of the Sámi languages. The paper re-examines a proposal made by Aikio (2004), which locates the emergence of Proto-Sámi near the Gulf of Finland at the onset of the Iron Age. Weighing different pieces of anthropological, archaeological and genetic evidence, the study concludes that Aikio’s hypothesis remains unrefuted, as it can be brought into accord with the available linguistic evidence. 3.2 Phonology In her chapter on the endangered Finno-Ugric language Ingrian, Natalia Kuznetsova addresses two phonological rarities. The first of these is a case of con- Introducing new trends in Nordic linguistic research 5 sonant gradation, a phenomenon that is quite common across Finnic and Sámi languages, but which is special in Ingrian because a three-way quantity contrast can be observed in this language. As a second phenomenon, the study discusses reduced voiceless vowels. Vowels of this kind are typologically rare, and the few cases that are discussed in the literature differ qualitatively from those that are found in Ingrian. The chapter offers a description of these two phenomena and continues with a thorough discussion of their evolution and maintenance. Kristján Árnason studies phonological variation in Faroese, which differs sociolinguistically from both continental Europe and from Iceland, with which it shares tendencies of linguistic conservatism. For a long time, the Faroese community had been diglossic, with Danish serving as the H-variety for use for clerical and administrative purposes. An indigenous written standard of Modern Faroese was only created in the 19th century; that is, the linguistic situation and the historical development of Faroese is in many respects like the development of Norwegian. Analyzing variables such as final syllable reduction and final vowel deletion in present-day spoken Faroese, Árnason identifies patterns that differ from traditional descriptions. These findings are discussed with reference to the phenomena of dialect levelling and koineization. 3.3 Morphosyntax In a chapter that illustrates the outward-looking nature of the ICNGL conference, Jeremy Bradley offers a description of converb constructions in the Finno-Ugric language Mari, which is spoken in the Volga basin. The discussion focuses on how these complex verbal predicates map onto different meanings, such as simultaneous action, cause and effect, directed motion, as well as convey different aspectual meanings. The study further raises the issue of how converb constructions are to be translated into languages that lack comparable morphosyntactic structures. Ulla Stroh-Wollin studies the diachrony of the anaphoric pronouns han(n) ‘he’ and hon (hun) ‘she’. These forms are exclusive to North Germanic and their origins are the subject of a long-standing debate. Taking another look at the history of potential etymologies for han, the study revisits a highly influential account by Kock (1908), who viewed the pronoun as a Proto-Nordic innovation, and who explicitly argued against a reconstruction from Indo-European (cf. Greek kēnos). Stroh-Wollin argues that Kock’s proposal is less plausible than the IE proposal, which is based on regular sound changes. It is suggested that Kock’s proposal owed its popularity to the predominant assumption of the early 20th century that Proto-Germanic was relatively homogenous. It therefore, at the time, 6 Martin Hilpert, Michael Rießler, Jan-Ola Östman, Christine Mertzlufft, and Janet Duke seemed unlikely that these pronouns could have survived only in the North Germanic branch. The chapter by Margret Jónsdóttir addresses the Icelandic “dative sickness” (Thráinsson 2007), which describes the diachronic drift from accusative to dative subjects documented in many Icelandic verbs, which can take both dative and accusative subjects. Since non-nominative subjects have been lost in Mainland Scandinavian as well as in English, it is commonly thought that the diachronic drift finds its natural end in nominative subjects. Jónsdóttir’s study shows that the issue is more complex. The chapter focuses on the verbs fjölga ‘increase (in number)’ and fækka ‘decrease (in number)’, which have changed in the history of Icelandic from having subjects in the accusative to having them in the dative, but with nominative appearing as an intermediate stage. The study discusses possible explanations for this development, among them a semantic connection between the causative and anticausative uses of fjölga and fækka. 3.4 Syntax Karl Erland Gadelii takes up a theoretical model that has a long tradition in the syntactic analysis of the Nordic languages, namely Diderichsen’s positional scheme (Diderichsen 1946). Gadelii argues that this topological tool for the analysis of clausal syntax not only has a useful role to play in language teaching and grammatical description, where it remains in current use in various guises, but that the scheme holds implications for syntactic theory, a point that is not widely acknowledged. In order to support this claim, Gadelii shows the need to augment Diderichsen’s original syntactic template by an additional slot and demonstrates the applicability of this augmented scheme for a range of examples discussed in the generative-minimalist literature. The chapter furthermore notes a set of problematic examples and suggests intricate avenues for further study. Henrik Rosenqvist takes a principles and parameters approach to the analysis of Övdalian (Swe. älvdalsmålet), which is spoken in North-Western Dalarna, Sweden. Within this approach, the setting of a parameter is thought to influence several syntactic structures at the same time, thereby constraining what structures may be found alongside each other in the same language. For instance, it has been argued for the Scandinavian languages that syntactic constructions such as null expletive subjects, transitive expletives and stylistic fronting appear in languages that show verb raising in embedded clauses and that have rich inflectional morphology (Holmberg and Platzack 1995). However, a recurrent problem in research addressing this issue has been that dialectal variability has made broad generalizations impossible. Rosenqvist argues that referential null Introducing new trends in Nordic linguistic research 7 subjects in Övdalian do indeed provide evidence that there is a specific syntactic parameter at work that influences these structures. The final chapter directly addressing syntactic phenomena is the contribution by Ida Larsson and Janne Bondi Johannessen, which takes the reader across the Atlantic and offers a discussion of embedded word order in Heritage Scandinavian, i. e. the language of American Scandinavians who were born in America. On the basis of authentic recordings it is shown that Heritage Scandinavian differs from European Scandinavian with respect to word order in syntactically subordinate contexts, specifically as regards the order of adverb and finite verb in consecutive clauses, indirect questions, and relative clauses. The study considers several explanations for these phenomena. The possible explanations in terms of language contact and language attrition are rejected as the authors settle for an explanation in terms of generational change through incomplete language acquisition. 3.5 Grammaticalization The contribution by Andres Karjus is concerned with the development of lative markers that encode an outward direction. The paper focuses on four Eastern Circum-Baltic languages, specifically the Finnic languages Estonian and Võro and the Indo-European languages Latvian and Lithuanian. In these languages, a lexical item with the meaning ‘field’ has given rise to different lative markers. Karjus takes a synchronic approach, using questionnaire data to explore the semantic spectrum that these markers cover in present-day usage. The responses reveal cross-linguistic differences in the semantic breadth of the respective markers, which suggests that in some languages, the markers have grammaticalized to a greater extent than in others. The chapter demonstrates that quantitative comparisons of semantic variation can be usefully applied to the cross-linguistic study of grammaticalization. Helle Metslang, Karl Pajusalu, and Külli Habicht also deal with a Finnic language; their study addresses interrogative particles in Estonian that have developed out of additive, contrastive, and adversative conjunctions. In Estonian, polar questions are typically formed by means of sentence-initial or sentence-final particles. In relation to this, the chapter discusses several markers in which questions are introduced by elements that can also serve as conjunctions. The study explains the grammaticalization of coordinative interrogative particles with reference to the theory of on-line syntax (Auer 2009). When speakers use a conjunction to introduce an increment to an interlocutor’s speech, the follow-up proposition can be interpreted as an implicit request for confirmation 8 Martin Hilpert, Michael Rießler, Jan-Ola Östman, Christine Mertzlufft, and Janet Duke or non-confirmation from the interlocutor. In this way, constructions with initial conjunctions may become conventionally associated with interrogative meaning. 4 The way ahead If we take this sample of contributions from the Freiburg ICNGL conference as a representation of Nordic linguistics as it currently lives and breathes, what can we say about its future? We can observe that there are traditions and topics of interest that continue to be especially relevant in a Nordic context, such as language contact, the comparison of closely related languages and language varieties, and the diachrony of linguistic variation. To us it seems that a promising development visible in the contributions of this volume is the continuation of research on these issues, as the discipline broadens its geographical scope and as newly-developed methodological tools and theoretical concepts are adopted and applied to issues in Nordic linguistics. How this development will unfold in practice is a matter that presentations at future ICNGL meetings will undoubtedly reveal. References Aikio, Ante (2004): An essay on substrate studies and the origin of Saami. In: Irma Hyvärinen, Petri Kallio and Jarmo Korhonen (eds.), Etymologie, Entlehnungen und Entwicklungen: Festschrift für Jorma Koivulehto zum 70. Geburtstag, 5–34. Helsinki: Société Néophilologique. Auer, Peter (2009): On-line syntax: thoughts on the temporality of spoken language. Language Sciences 31: 1–13. Diderichsen, Paul (1946): Elementær dansk Grammatik. Copenhagen: Gyldendal. 2nd edition 1957, 3rd edition 1962. Eliasson, Stig (2010): The Nordic Association of Linguists: The preparatory phase and the first thirty years (1977–2006). In: Hans Götzsche (ed.), Memory, mind and language, 4–54. Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Holmberg, Anders and Christer Platzack (1995): The Role of Inflection in Scandinavian Syntax. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kock, Axel (1908): Etymologiska anmärkningar. Arkiv för nordisk filologi 24: 179–198. Thomason, Sarah (2001): Language Contact: An Introduction. Washington D. C.: Georgetown University Press. Thráinsson, Höskuldur (2007): The Syntax of Icelandic. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.