The distribution of main and embedded structures: V2 and non-V2 orders in North Germanic

Abstract

North Germanic has Verb Second (V2) word order in main but not embedded clauses. Although as a first approximation V2 is a phenomenon characteristic of root clauses, it has long been known that it occurs also in a restricted set of embedded clauses in many, if not all, of the North Germanic languages. Moreover, a wide variety of Norwegian dialects allow deviations from the standard V2 word order in main clause interrogatives. The asymmetric Verb Second pattern thus seemingly breaks down in different ways. This thesis presents new data from large-scale elicited production experiments targeting the placement of the finite verb in both main and embedded clauses. The distribution of deviations from the standard word order pattern, and the constraints on the environments where these are produced are of primary concern.

In addition, results from a Norwegian production experiment where speech was elicited in two ways -- using standardised written language and using spoken dialect as the elicitation source, show that most speakers directly activate morphophonological forms from the local dialect when encountering standardised orthographic forms. This suggests that speakers do not treat the written and spoken language as different grammars. Furthermore, we find syntactic variation which does not track the morphophonological variation, suggesting that a code/register-switching alone cannot explain syntactic optionality.

Overall, the results of the various studies within this thesis show that variation in the position of the verb, is found not only between languages, but within languages and within speakers. I therefore conclude that verb placement in North Germanic is not fully grammaticised. As an alternative, this thesis proposes a uniform syntactic structure for main and embedded clauses in North Germanic. In this structure, verb position is non-categorical though correlated with assertion semantics (embedded clauses) and prosody and lexicon (Norwegian main clauses).