Case on pronouns in heritage Norwegian and European Norwegian

Janne Bondi Johannessen, University of Oslo

Background and goal: A substantial amount of work has been done on nominal categories in heritage Norwegian in recent years, but the focus has been mainly on gender and agreement (see Johannessen & Larsson 2015, Lohndal & Westergaard 2016, Riksem 2017 and Rødvand 2017). Case is only a marginal morphological category in the modern Scandinavian (mainland) languages, which is probably why it has not been the focus of study so far. In this paper I will show the results of a study of pronominal case in heritage Norwegian and European Norwegian.

What constructions will be studied: In European Norwegian, though the case system is dwindling, most dialects have morphological case distinctions (nominative vs. accusative) in the 1st person singular and plural, 2nd person singular, and 1st person plural. The extent to which the remaining persons and numbers have case distinctions depends on the dialect. The paper will mainly look at the heritage Norwegian case following locative prepositions like på 'on' and i 'in', in which all dialects choose the accusative case (accusative): på meg/*jeg. In addition, the case following prepositions of comparison like enn 'than' and som 'that/who/which/' will be studied. For these prepositions, there is variation in European Norwegian (enn meg/jeg), possibly a dialectal phenomenon in which some use the nominative case (nominative) and some the accusative case (Faarlund et al. 197:319). Dative case exists in some dialects, but will not be the main focus of this paper.

Method: The Corpus of American Norwegian Speech and the Nordic Dialect Corpus will both be used to discover the use of these prepositions and their complements pronouns in European and heritage Norwegian. Other corpora (of American English and the Corpus of Oslo Speech) will also be consulted.

Why study pronominal case: The paper fills a gap in our knowledge of pronominal case in both varieties of Norwegian. Importantly, the results will also tell us about mechanisms of stability and change. If the speakers use non-target case forms after the locative prepositions, this is a new development that has arisen in the American context. Since English, like Norwegian, has the accusative case following locative prepositions (on me /*I) in the relevant pronouns, any use of nominative pronouns in Norwegian would be a development which would have to find some other explanation than copying a pattern from English. If they use the accusative case, morphological case, in this position, it must be regarded as a stable feature.

For the prepositions of comparison, on the other hand, there is already variation in the baseline European Norwegian. The results of the study of the heritage speakers will show whether the variation is the same as at home, or whether there has been a change in a different direction. Data from an American English speech corpus (Coca) show that, though both case forms are acceptable in English, only the accusative is used after the preposition of comparison. The language use of the heritage speakers will therefore be of interest to investigate whether speakers with a dialect background where the nominative form is used, have kept this feature, or whether they have changed towards the English system. A complicating factor may be the status of the phenomenon in the Norwegian dialects today.

Preliminary findings suggest that there are differences between European and heritage Norwegian. The preposition of comparison enn 'than' occurs only with the nominative case in heritage Norwegian while there is variation in European Norwegian. This and the rest of the results will be discussed with perspectives such as transfer, acquisition and attrition, as well as external factors, especially regarding the linguistic situation in the dialects at the time of emigration.

References

  • Faarlund, Jan Terje, Svein Lie & Kjell Ivar Vannebo.1997. Norsk referansegrammatikk. Oslo: Universitetsforla-get.
  • Johannessen, Janne B. & Ida Larsson. 2015. Complexity Matters: On Gender Agreement in Heritage Scandina-vian. Frontiers in Psychology, 6.
  • Lohndal, Terje & Marit Westergaard. 2016. Grammatical gender in American Norwegian heritage language: Stability or attrition? Frontiers in Psychology, 7.
  • Riksem, Brita Ramsevik. (2017) Language Mixing and Diachronic Change: American Norwegian Noun Phrases Then and Now. Languages. vol. 2 (2).
  • Rødvand, Linn-Iren Sjånes. 2017. Empirical investigations of grammatical gender in American Heritage Norwe-gian. MA thesis, UiO: Department of Linguistics and Scandinavian Studies.

URLs

  • Corpus of American Norwegian Speech (CANS): http://www.tekstlab.uio.no/norskiamerika/english/corpus.html
  • Corpus of Contemporary American Speech: http://corpus.byu.edu/coca/
  • Nordic Dialect Corpus: http://www.tekstlab.uio.no/nota/scandiasyn/index.html
  • Norwegian Speech Corpus - the Oslo part (NoTa-Oslo): http://www.tekstlab.uio.no/nota/oslo/english.html