Terje Wagener - The History of Nordic Relative Clauses

Terje Wagener

Trends in Linguistics Studies and Monographs

Editor

Volker Gast

Editorial Board

Walter Bisang

Jan Terje Faarlund

Hans Henrich Hock

Natalia Levshina

Heiko Narrog

Matthias Schlesewsky

Amir Zeldes

Niina Ning Zhang

Editor responsible for this volume

Volker Gast

Volume 304

ISBN 978-3-11-049557-7

e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-049653-6

e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-049295-8

ISSN 1861-4302

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The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de.

2017 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

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This book is a reworked version of my PhD-dissertation from 2014, The history of Norwegian relative clauses. I would thus like to thank Prof. Jan Terje Faarlund at the University of Oslo, who was my supervisor. He was and remains a great pleasure to discuss linguistics (and politics) with. Second, I would like to send my thanks to Prof. Endre Mrck at the University of Troms, who did a superb job supervising my MA-thesis back in the days.

Some of the individuals that have held out with me throughout the years (in no particular order): Olka Kolenda, Ratcliffe, Nelson and my mother.

I dedicate this book with love, affection and gratefulness to Ania Duckie Kirstein.

Examples have been provided with a word-for-word gloss as well as an idiomatic translation, except when the gloss and the translation are identical. English and the Scandinavian languages are very closely related. Therefore, I have not found it necessary to explicitly mark all the morphosyntactic features of each gloss. Case is marked only when it is relevant for the discussion (for instance, in explaining case attraction). Relative complementizers are invariably marked COMP. The determiner s and its cognates and descendants have also been found worthy of explicit marking, since this element plays a key role in Nordic relative clauses from the earliest days. I have chosen three different annotations for this element: S for Old Norse and Old Swedish s ; THEN for Middle Norwegian and Middle Danish (and partially also Late Old Swedish) then/thn and, finally, DEN for the Modern Scandinavian languages.

When the distinction between younger and older Middle Danish and Old Swedish is not relevant, they are referred to simply as Middle Danish (MLD) and Old Swedish (OSW). I use Early Nordic as a term to cover the Nordic languages in their Old and Middle stages in general. Moreover, in the early period it makes sense to distinguish between a West-Nordic and an East-Nordic dialect (cf. Haugen 1976:199). West-Nordic (i.e. Old Norwegian and Old Icelandic) corresponds to Old Norse, so I will stick to the latter term. But I will use the term East-Nordic to refer to Swedish and Danish, in particular in reference to the old and middle stages of those languages (when the east/west-division is important).

Finally, I have found it difficult to avoid the term Scandinavian altogether, especially when referring to the modern languages. I use it here in the sense of Mainland-Scandinavian, i.e. not including Icelandic and Faroese. With regard to the modern languages, the differences between Danish, Swedish and Norwegian on the one hand and Icelandic and Faroese on the other are so significant that a term referring only to the former is called for.