Philip Holmes - Norwegian: A Comprehensive Grammar

Norwegian: A Comprehensive Grammar is a complete reference guide to modern Norwegian (the Bokml standard). The Grammar is an essential source for the serious student of Norwegian, and for students of comparative linguistics. It is ideal for use in colleges, universities and adult classes of all types.

The volume is organised to promote a thorough understanding of Norwegian grammar. It presents the complexities of Norwegian in a concise and readable form. Explanations are full, clear and free of jargon. Throughout, the emphasis is on Norwegian as used by present-day native speakers.

An extensive index, numbered paragraphs, cross-references and summary charts provide readers with easy access to the information they require.

Philip Holmes is Reader Emeritus in Scandinavian Studies at the University of Hull, UK, and co-author of four grammars of Swedish and Danish for Routledge, as well as Colloquial Swedish (2016).

Hans-Olav Enger is Professor of Scandinavian Linguistics at Institutt for lingvistiske og nordiske studier at Oslo University, Norway. He has edited Norsk Lingvistisk Tidsskrift, is currently editor of Maal og Minne and is the author of many articles and book chapters on the Norwegian language, as well as co-author of Innfring i norsk grammatikk Morfologi og syntaks.

Comprehensive Grammars are available for the following languages:

Bengali

Burmese

Cantonese

Chinese

Catalan

Cantonese

Danish

Dutch

Finnish

French Creoles

Greek

Indonesian

Japanese

Kazakh

Korean

Modern Welsh

Modern Written Arabic

Norwegian

Panjabi

Persian

Polish

Slovene

Swedish

Turkish

Ukrainian

Other titles in this series can be found at www.routledge.com/languages/series/SE0550

Philip Holmes and Hans-Olav Enger

First published 2018
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

and by Routledge
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Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

2018 Philip Holmes and Hans-Olav Enger

The right of Philip Holmes and Hans-Olav Enger to be identified as authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Holmes, Philip, 1944 author. | Enger, HansOlav, 1965 author.

Title: Norwegian : a comprehensive grammar / Philip Holmes and HansOlav Enger.

Description: Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, [2018] | Series: Routledge comprehensive grammars | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017053103 | ISBN 9780415831352 (hardback : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780415831369 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781351059831 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Norwegian languageGrammarStudy and teaching. | Norwegian languageStudy and teaching.

Classification: LCC PD2623 .H575 2018 | DDC 439.8/25dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017053103

ISBN: 978-0-415-83135-2 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-415-83136-9 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-351-05983-1 (ebk)

Typeset in Sabon and Gill Sans
by Apex CoVantage, LLC

Our aims in writing this book are both to describe the structure and usage of contemporary written and spoken Norwegian Bokml and to provide a source of reference in English for the more advanced student or even teacher so as to help non-native learners develop fluency when using Bokml.

As far as we are aware, this is the first attempt to write a truly comprehensive English-language grammar of Bokml. Because of restrictions on time and the length of this book, we have sadly not simultaneously been able to cover Norwegian Nynorsk.

A substantial index is provided to both Norwegian and English key words as well as grammatical concepts.

We have attempted to employ a terminology that is comprehensible to the learner whose mother tongue is not Norwegian and one not too far removed from the established terminology used in Norwegian language grammars which such a learner may also encounter. Where we have differed in our usage from these standard works of reference in Norwegian, such as the incomparable Norsk referansegrammatikk (NRG), we have pointed this out.

Bokml is not uniform. Unlike Swedish and Danish, Norwegian has no standard written language, and we have tried to steer a middle course in guiding the learner through the minefields of on the one hand ultra- conservative and on the other ultra-radical views respectively on Bokml.

A book of this kind requires hundreds of examples. Many have been taken from the Oslo Corpus in order to ensure high frequency. In some cases, these have been adapted to help in the learning/teaching process. The English translations are our own.

The book is intended to be comparative, and our own translations have been provided for the vast majority of examples as an additional aid in the task of learning how to render Norwegian accurately into English.

Norwegian: A Comprehensive Grammar is not of course primarily intended for Norwegians, but for intermediate and advanced foreign learners of Norwegian, and therefore concentrates on the questions these learners frequently raise, in some cases with their teachers, and it is our hope that it may provide some answers to these.

We are indebted to scholars who have written on Scandinavian grammars before us (not only those listed in the bibliography), to our teachers, colleagues and students.

Philip Holmes and Hans-Olav Enger
Kineton, England, and Oslo, Norway, 2017