We address the question whether speakers activate different grammars when they encounter linguistic input from different registers, here written standardised language and spoken dialect. This question feeds into the larger theoretical and empirical question if variable syntactic patterns should be modelled as switching between different registers/grammars, or as underspecified mappings from form to ...

In this article, we present the Nordic Word Order Database (NWD), with a focus on the rationale behind it, the methods used in data elicitation, data analysis and the empirical scope of the database. NWD is an online database with a user-friendly search interface, hosted by The Text Laboratory at the University of Oslo, launched in April 2019 (https://tekstlab.uio.no/nwd). It contains elicited ...

Norwegian 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 Norwegian, as in many, if not all, of the other North Germanic languages. Many Norwegian dialects in addition allow deviations from the standard V2 word ...

This article gives a summary of the Swedish and Danish data on verb placement in the Nordic Word order Database (NWD; Lundquist et al. 2019). The data were collected using an elicited production paradigm. I discuss variation in verb placement in Danish in four constructions: in embedded clauses with respect to adverbs (embedded V2), in main clauses with respect to preverbal and sentence-medial ...