Verb placement in embedded clauses in heritage Norwegian
Permanent lenke
https://hdl.handle.net/10037/34361Dato
2024-07-26Type
Journal articleTidsskriftartikkel
Peer reviewed
Forfatter
Jensberg, Helene Ruud; Anderssen, Merete Brendeford; Lohndal, Terje; Lundquist, Björn; Westergaard, Marit Kristine RichardsenSammendrag
Methodology: 50second to fifth-generation speakers from the Corpus of American Nordic Speech (CANS) are compared with a baseline consisting of 13 first-generation speakers from the same corpus and a large corpus study on verb placement in embedded clauses in European Norwegian.
Findings: The speakers behave differently from the baseline, as they use main clause word order in embedded clauses, especially when the finite verb is an auxiliary. Furthermore, there is a correlation between main clause word order in embedded clauses and V2 violations in main clauses. We propose a combination of crosslinguistic influence, language-internal drift, differential acquisition, and activation of the heritage language as possible factors affecting the speaker’s production.
Originality: Whereas several studies have looked at main clause word order in the same and similar populations, not as much work has been done on embedded clauses. We also combine data from the same informants from a previous study to look at correlations between the behaviour in main and embedded clauses.
Implications: This study illustrates how heritage languages are affected by different factors across speakers; where some speakers seem to simplify the language, others have held on to fine-grained distinctions.