Kersti Börjars

Morphological status and (de)grammaticalisation: the Swedish possessive

It has been argued that the development of the Swedish possessive -s constitutes an example of degrammaticalisation because it has changed from being an af?x to being a clitic (Norde 1997; 2001a, b). I argue that a simple distinction between af?x and clitic cannot capture the development of this element, instead a distinction in two dimensions need to be made; PLACEMENT needs to be distinguished from DEGREE OF ATTACHMENT. Furthermore, I claim that the distinction between agreement and once only marking represents yet another dimension. With respect to the Swedish possessive, as Norde (1997) shows, there has been a clear change from agreement to once only marking; however, I argue that this change does not tell us anything about the element?s morphological status. With respect to placement, -s is still subject to competing constraints and with respect to attachment, there is some evidence of morphological interaction between the -s and the word to which it attaches. It is then inappropriate to call the Swedish possessive -s a clitic and to refer to the change which it has undergone as degrammaticalisation.

Swedish double determination in a European typological perspective

This article discusses a phenomenon which has been referred to as ‘double determination’, ‘double definiteness’, or in the Scandinavian tradition ‘over-definiteness’. In this article, I define double determination and double definiteness, so that a distinction is made between the two terms. I use ‘double determination’ when both elements can function independently as semantic determiners. ‘Double definiteness’, on the other hand, is a form of agreement. A number of Swedish constructions are then examined which are plausible candidates for double determination. It is shown that only some of these are genuine cases of double determination, the others are more accurately described as double definiteness. In the cases of double determination, the determination is represented once as a syntactic element and once as a morphological element. The second part of this article focuses on this ‘morphological determiner’, referred to as def. The Swedish morphological determiner is compared with those of the other Scandinavian languages and the languages of the Balkans. It is shown that in languages which have an element like the Swedish def there is considerable variation in how this element functions within the language and in its status with respect to double determination and double definiteness.

The clitic-affix distinction, historical change, and Scandinavian bound definiteness marking

In the literature on grammaticalization, it is generally assumed that there are two categories of bound elements, clitics and affixes, and that a development from the former to the latter is an example of grammaticalization. Frequently, this development in form is assumed to be associated with a change in function. In this paper, we argue that a simple dichotomy between clitic and affix does not do justice to the variation found between bound elements, nor to the changes they undergo over time. We also argue that changes in form are not always accompanied by a change in function. We illustrate our discussion with the history and current distribution of definiteness marking in Scandinavian.

On Constructing a Theory of Grammatical Change

The last few decades have seen the growth of a community of linguists who, though diverse in their beliefs and assumptions about other aspects of linguistics, nevertheless share a commitment to the construction as the basic unit of linguistic analysis. In construction grammar (henceforth CxG), as this family of approaches is known, ‘construction’ is understood – beyond its pretheoretical sense – as a conventionalized pairing of form and meaning (Booij 2010: 11; Sag 2012: 97; cf. also Goldberg 2006: 5). Varieties of CxG have been deployed in domains as diverse as sentence production (Bencini & Goldberg 2001; Bencini 2013), child language acquisition (Cameron-Faulkner et al. 2003; Diessel 2013), computational linguistics (papers in Steels 2012), and the theory of long-distance dependencies (Sag 2010). Unsurprisingly, perhaps, another of these domains is diachronic linguistics. CxG has been used in modelling grammaticalization (No€el 2007; Trousdale 2008; and much subsequent research); in addition, proponents of CxG have argued that it lends itself well to the modelling of actualization due to its conception of linguistic structure as a network of related constructions (de Smet 2012), and that it is well suited to the task of syntactic reconstruction (Barðdal & Eyþ orsson 2012). Despite this flurry of interest in historical CxG, there was until recently no book-length treatment of the implications of this grammatical architecture in diachrony, comparable in scope for instance to Lightfoot (1979) for the generative Extended Standard Theory of the time. The volume under review (henceforth T&T) is an attempt to fill this gap: the authors focus on ‘developing ways to think about the creation of and the nature of changes in constructions’ (p. 1), where a construction is understood as a pairing of form and meaning, essentially a Saussurean sign (p. 4). The work is therefore pioneering in terms of its scope and angle, a welcome attempt to provide an overarching framework for diachronic work in CxG. The authors have clearly set themselves an ambitious task. The first chapter of the book sets the stage by introducing the basic notions of CxG and its most influential variants, including the key elements that T&T themselves adopt: here the

Introduction: The syntax of nominals and noun phrases

The noun phrase was long a neglected area within research in modern syntactic theory. Studies tended to focus instead on the clause and less attention was paid to the internal structure of the noun phrase. The early studies would often take an interest in the properties of noun phrases only in so far as they interacted with clausal morpho-syntax. Nominalisations were then subject to some early studies, as in Chomsky (1970) and work inspired by it. A major boost of interest in the morpho-syntax of noun phrases came with the appearance of Abney in (1987) and preceding that, but with less of an immediate impact than Abney, Szabolcsi (1981, 1984, 1987). There is a sense in which this development also was the result of approaching noun phrases from a clausal perspective. Work leading up to Barriers (Chomsky 1986) had established the idea that clauses were headed by functional categories, at this stage just C and I. Much of the early work on noun phrases then set out with the aim of establishing whether a functional head analysis of noun phrases was also motivated. The answer in this literature was positive and the DP-hypothesis was established; the determiner was assumed to head the noun phrase. The 1990s saw a period of intense work on noun phrases within generative grammar and further functional heads were posited, see for instance Ritter (1991), Valois (1991), Bernstein (1993), Cinque (1994) and Longobardi (1994), to mention but a few. Less attention was paid to noun phrases within theories other than Government and Binding, but a notable exception is the analysis proposed within Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar by Netter (1994). Interestingly, one of the earliest articles proposing that noun phrases were headed by determiners was based on Norwegian (Hellan 1986). However, the details of this analysis were quite different from those of the analysis later proposed by Abney