Verb Second Word Order in Norwegian Heritage Language: Syntax and Pragmatics

Abstract

In this paper, we investigate verb second (V2) word order in Norwegian heritage language spoken in the United States, i.e., in a situation where the heritage speakers have English as their dominant language. We show that not only the syntax of V2 may be affected in a heritage language situation, but that the number of contexts for this word order may also be severely reduced (i.e., non-subject-initial declaratives). V2 languages typically have a high proportion of non-subject-initial declaratives in spontaneous speech, while English declaratives are mainly subject-initial. The reduction of non-subject-initial declaratives (the context for V2) is thus argued to be the result of cross-linguistic influence from English. We also show that this correlates with non-target-consistent word order, in that the fewer contexts for V2 that speakers produce, the more non-target-consistent non-V2 word order appear in their data. We also discuss to what extent there is a causal relationship between the two phenomena.