Terje Lohndal

Negative concord and (multiple) agree: a case study of West Flemish

This article examines the formalization of negative concord in terms of the Minimalist Program, focusing entirely on negative concord in West Flemish. It is shown that a recent analysis of negative concord that advocates Multiple Agree is empirically inadequate. Instead of Multiple Agree, a particular implementation of the simpler and less powerful binary Agree proves superior in deriving the data in question.

Freezing effects and objects

This paper is an investigation of freezing effects, that is, cases where an element (e.g. an object or a subject, or an element within it) is unable to move from a certain structural position. An account of the most prominent properties of freezing in Norwegian is followed by a comparative study of primarily English and Norwegian indirect objects, with important consequences for the general approach to indirect objects. Although recent analyses capture central properties of indirect objects, they fall short of accounting for freezing properties, seen here in terms of agreement properties, most notably Case agreement. It is shown that both subjects and indirect objects disallow sub-extraction in both English and Norwegian; however, unlike English, Norwegian allows the indirect object to A-bar move. This relates to the question of whether Case is structural or inherent. As such, this paper offers a new argument in favor of Case as a central ingredient in deriving freezing effects.

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

This paper investigates possible attrition/change in the gender system of Norwegian heritage language spoken in America. Based on data from 50 speakers in the Corpus of American Norwegian Speech (CANS), we show that the three-gender system is to some extent retained, although considerable overgeneralization of the masculine (the most frequent gender) is attested. This affects both feminine and neuter gender forms, while declension class markers such as the definite suffix remain unaffected. We argue that the gender category is vulnerable due to the lack of transparency of gender assignment in Norwegian. Furthermore, unlike incomplete acquisition, which may result in a somewhat different or reduced gender system, attrition is more likely to lead to general erosion, eventually leading to complete loss of gender.

Phrase Structure and Argument Structure: A Case Study of the Syntax-Semantics Interface

1. Introduction 2. The size of a verb 3. Specifiers and phrase structure 4. The syntax-semantics mapping 5. Semantic competence and compositionality

Language mixing and exoskeletal theory: A case study of word-internal mixing in American Norwegian

This paper discusses word-internal mixing in American Norwegian. The data show that the functional vocabulary is Norwegian whereas many of the lexical content items come from English. We argue that language mixing provides important evidence for grammatical theory: Specifically, the data support a late-insertion exoskeletal model of grammar like Distributed Morphology, in which the primitives of syntax are abstract feature bundles (morphemes) and bare roots. In such a theory, the structure is a separate entity, a sort of skeleton or frame, built of abstract morphemes. The phonological exponents of the roots and abstract morphemes are inserted late into designated slots. We show how such a model can explain the observed pattern for mixing within verb phrases and noun phrases in American Norwegian.

Government-binding/principles and parameters theory.

Principles and Parameters Theory is an approach to the study of the human language capacity based on an abstract underlying representation and operations called transformations successively altering that structure. It has gradually evolved from the Government and Binding Theory to the Minimalist Program. Copyright

Medial adjunct PPs in English: implications for the syntax of sentential negation

This paper provides evidence that medial adjunct PPs in English are possible. On the basis of corpus data, it is shown that sentence-medial adjunct PPs are not unacceptable and are attested. Our corpus data also reveal a sharp asymmetry between negative and non-negative adjunct PPs. The analysis of the corpus revealed the following pattern: Non-negative adjunct PPs such as at that time resist medial position and instead tend to be postverbal; negative adjunct PPs such as at no time appear medially rather than postverbally. In the second part of the paper, we broaden the empirical domain and include negative complement PPs in the discussion. It is shown that when it comes to the licensing of question tags, English negative complement PPs, which are postverbal, pattern differently from postverbal negative adjunct PPs. That is, sentences with a postverbal negative adjunct PP pattern with negative sentences in taking a positive question tag, while sentences containing a postverbal negative argument PP pattern with affirmative sentences in taking a negative tag. To account for the observed adjunct-argument asymmetry in the licensing of question tags, we propose that clauses are typed for polarity and we explore the hypothesis that a polarity head in the left periphery of the clause is crucially involved in the licensing of sentential negation.

Lexicalist vs. exoskeletal approaches to language mixing

Abstract This article presents empirical evidence that disfavors using highly lexicalist minimalist models, such as the one presented in Chomsky (1995), when analyzing language mixing. The data analyzed consist of English – Spanish mixed noun phrases discussed in Moro (2014) as well as English – Norwegian mixed noun phrases and verbs taken from the Corpus of American Norwegian Speech. Whereas the lexicalist model in Chomsky (1995) only can explain a subset of the mixing patterns attested in both authentic English – Spanish mixed noun phrases and the American Norwegian corpus, we show that an alternative exoskeletal model can account for all of them. Such a model would entail that rather than assuming lexical items with inherent, functional features that determine the derivation, syntactic structures are generated independently from the lexical items that come to realize them.

Introducing the minimalist program to students of English

In this review we evaluate two textbook introductions to the Minimalist Program (MP), the most recent incarnation of the Chomskyan paradigm: Analysing English sentences and An introduction to English sentence structure, both by Andrew Radford. Since there are no significant differences between the two books, our review focuses on the first version, which is slightly longer than the second.

The logic of parametric theories

Parameters in minimalist theory: The case of Scandinavian (henceforth, PMT), by Anders Holmberg, is an interesting attempt to defend the view that deep parameters should be part of the grammatical system. PMT argues that parameters should be seen as points of underspecification, and in part as 3 rd factor effects in the sense of Chomsky (2005) - thus casting doubts on attempts to locate parametric variation in the lexicon and at the interfaces. In our view, however, PMT does not quite make the case for a deep parameter. In examining this case, we also seek to clarify the relationship between parametric theories and acquisition, and more generally underspecification.