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What kind of Scandinavian? On interrogative noun phrases across North Germanic

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 December 2008

Øystein Alexander Vangsnes
Øystein Alexander Vangsnes*
Affiliation:
Faculty of Humanities, University of Tromsø, NO-9037 Tromsø, [email protected]
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Abstract

A central objective of this paper is to show how much variation there is across Scandinavian with respect to the morphosyntactic form of interrogative noun phrases. The present paper focuses on three main types of such DPs: (i) phrases involving a cognate of English which, (ii) phrases involving the same element as manner ‘how’ (which is morphologically complex and distinct from degree ‘how’), and (iii) phrases involving ‘what’ with or without an overt kind noun. With respect to all of these different types of noun-phrase-internal wh-expressions an interesting pattern seems to emerge: there are reasons to hold that adnominal wh-expressions start out as modifiers, yielding kind-querying noun phrases, and then develop into determiners, yielding token-querying noun phrases. Although further investigations will have to determine whether such a developmental path (or cycle) is quite general in nature, it can be made perfect sense of with reference to grammaticalization triggered by wh-movement which operates on a DP-structure that distinguishes modification from determination in such a way that the locus of determination is higher than modification.

Keywords

adnominal cycledialect syntaxDP syntaxkind vs. token readingsmicro-comparative syntaxScandinavianwh-determinerswh-nominals
Type
Research Article
Information
Nordic Journal of Linguistics , Volume 31 , Special Issue 2: The syntax of nominals and noun phrases , December 2008 , pp. 227 - 251
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2008

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