It is well known that German and Dutch have productive diminutive morphology. What is much less discussed is the fact that several other Germanic languages do not have such productive morphology, notably the Scandinavian languages. Instead, these languages form compounds to express a diminutive meaning. This paper addresses the puzzle of why the Scandinavian languages do not have productive ...

This paper discusses grammatical gender in Norwegian by bringing together data from first language acquisition, Norwegian heritage language, and dialect change. In all these contexts, gender is often claimed to be a vulnerable category, arguably due to the relative non-transparency of gender assignment. Furthermore, the feminine gender is in the process of being lost in many Norwegian dialects, as ...

This paper discusses the interplay between acquisition and theory construction. It endeavors to show how a more direct and crucially bi‐directional relationship between formal linguistic theory and the study of heritage language bilingualism can provide mutual benefit. It will be argued that data from acquisition—not exclusively but indeed especially from heritage language bilingualism—provide windows ...

Formal approaches tobi-and multilingual grammars rely on two important claims: (i)the grammatical architecture should be able to deal withmonoandbi-/multilingual data without any specific constraints for the latter, (ii)features play a pivotal role in accounting for patterns across and within grammars. In the present paper, it is argued that an exoskeletal approach to grammar, which clearly distinguishes ...

Grammatisk kjønn utgjør derfor en formidabel utfordring for lingvistisk teori. Denne utfordringen tok forskningsprosjektet MultiGender: A Multilingual Approach to Grammatical Gender med til Senter for grunnforskning (CAS) i det akademiske året 2019–2020. Prosjektet, ledet av Terje Lohndal og Marit Westergaard, tok for seg grammatisk kjønn fra et flerspråklig og multimetodisk perspektiv, og alle ...

We present a series of large-scale formal acceptability judgment studies that explored Norwegian island phenomena in order to follow up on previous observations that speakers of Mainland Scandinavian languages like Norwegian accept violations of certain island constraints that are unacceptable in most languages cross-linguistically. We tested the acceptability of wh-extraction from five island types: ...

This paper presents case-studies of language mixing within verbs and nouns in the heritage language American Norwegian, which refers to varieties spoken by Norwegian immigrants to the US and their descendants. The paper builds on data from the newly established <i>Corpus of American Norwegian Speech</i> and argues in favor of an exoskeletal approach to language mixing. This approach distinguishes ...

It is well known that grammatical gender systems may change historically. Previous research has documented loss of the feminine gender in several Norwegian dialects, including those spoken in Oslo and Tromsø (Lødrup in Maal og Minne 2:120–136, 2011; Rodina and Westergaard in J Ger Linguist 27(2):145–187 2015). In these dialects, the change is characterized by replacement of the feminine indefinite ...

The growing interdisciplinary research feld of psycholinguistics is in constant need of new and up-to-date tools which will allow researchers to answer complex questions, but also expand on languages other than English, which dominates the feld. One type of such tools are picture datasets which provide naming norms for everyday objects. However, existing databases tend to be small in terms of ...

Mainland Scandinavian languages have been reported to allow movement from embedded questions, relative clauses, and complex NPs—domains commonly considered to be islands crosslinguistically. Yet in formal acceptability studies Scandinavian participants often show 'island effects': they reject island-violating movement similarly to native speakers of 'island-sensitive' languages. To investigate this ...