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This book explores the syntactic structures of Mainland Scandinavian, a term that covers the Northern Germanic languages spoken in Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and parts of Finland. The continuum of mutually intelligible standard languages, regional varieties, and dialects stretching from southern Jutland to eastern Finland share many syntactic patterns and features, but also present interesting syntactic differences. In this volume, Jan Terje Faarlund discusses the main syntactic features of the national languages, alongside the most widespread or typologically interesting features of the non-standard varieties. Each topic is illustrated with examples drawn from reference grammars, research literature, corpora of various sorts, and the author's own research. The framework is current generative grammar, but the volume is descriptive in nature, with technical formalities and theoretical discussion kept to a minimum. It will hence be a valuable reference for students and researchers working on any Scandinavian language, as well as for syntacticians and typologists interested in Scandinavian facts and data without necessarily being able to read Scandinavian.
List of contents
- 1: Introduction
- 2: Nominals
- 3: The adjective phrase
- 4: The prepositional phrase
- 5: The verb phrase
- 6: The finite clause
- 7: The independent sentence
- 8: Subordinate clauses
- 9: Anaphor binding
- 10: Coordination and ellipsis
About the author
Jan Terje Faarlund is Professor Emeritus of Scandinavian Linguistics at the University of Oslo, having previously held positions at the Universities of Trondheim and Chicago. His main fields of research are the North Germanic languages, syntactic theory, diachronic syntax, and Mesoamerican languages. He is the author of A Grammar of Chiapas Zoque (OUP, 2012) and The Syntax of Old Norse (OUP, 2004), and is the recipient of the Gad Rausing Prize from the Royal Swedish Academy of Letters.
Summary
This book explores the syntactic structures of Mainland Scandinavian, a term that covers a continuum of mutually intelligible languages spoken in Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and parts of Finland. It is descriptive in nature, with examples drawn from reference grammars, research literature, corpora of various sorts, and the author's own research.
Additional text
This book is immediately relevant and interesting to a wide audience, and it will certainly be useful to many in the future who will continue to come back to it for further exploration.
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This book is immediately relevant and interesting to a wide audience, and it will certainly be useful to many in the future who will continue to come back to it for further exploration. John D. Sundquist, Scandinavian Studies
