Stylistic Fronting (SF) is usually defined as a special kind of fronting, where a constituent (or part of a constituent) which is not the subject is moved to a position that precedes the finite verb. SF is found in both Old Spanish and Old Norwegian. In this chapter we show that the two languages share several common properties regarding fronting patterns in embedded clauses, more specifically in restrictive relative clauses, and that in both languages, apparent heads and unambiguous phrases may be fronted. In both languages a fronted element may cooccur with an overt phrasal subject. These findings contribute to the ongoing debate on the phenomenon of Stylistic Fronting, suggesting that the original strong claims made regarding SF in Icelandic are idiosyncratic, and that the term Stylistic Fronting in fact subsumes several types of movement operations (Labelle & Hirschbühler 2017), some of which have none of the properties originally claimed for Stylistic Fronting in Icelandic. Furthermore, it appears as though the pragmatic effects of the fronting were similar in the two languages; fronting in restrictive relative clauses occurs to check an anaphoric feature (López 2009). The striking parallelisms between Old Spanish, a Romance language, and Old Norwegian, a Germanic one, invites further comparative research on similar syntactic phenomena in the languages.

This paper is a qualitative study of a limited number of recomplementation structures in Old Spanish, isolating at least three different pragmatic uses connected to speech acts. The study shows that second que was a versatile marker with core functions connected to indirect and direct assertion. It is shown that the sandwiched material in structures with recomplementation belong to the higher fields of the left periphery, but that contrary to a 2007 analysis by Sandra Paoli, they are not always topical in nature, and second que can therefore not merely be a topic marker. It is argued that second que in its most neutral version is the lexicalization of a speech act-operator, generating a speaker deixis-projection such as that suggested in a 2006 paper by Liliane Haegeman, and compatible with the analysis proposed for interrogative clauses in 2013 by Carlos De Cuba and Jonathan E. MacDonald, as well as Francesc González i Planas’ pragmatic analyses for Modern Spanish, shedding light on the development of second que in the history of Spanish.

The syntactic functions of subject and object are usually characterized by a certain semantic role and/or discourse function (information structure). In a “free word order” language, the position of a phrase at main clause level tends to be determined by its discourse function, while retaining its prototypical semantic role. In this paper we show that in the earlier stages of Germanic (represented by Norwegian) and of Romance (Spanish), the syntactic functions of subject and object were largely characterized by their semantic role, rather than by information structure. These languages then underwent a change, whereby the discourse-functional properties of subjects and objects became more prominent, allowing subjects to express various semantic roles.

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Hovudmålet med artikkelen er å skissere eit grunnleggande rammeverk for grammatikkundervisning i norsk skule som bygger på grammatikkforskingsfeltet. Skulegrammatikkdebatten har ei lang historie, men vi tar utgangspunkt i forholda slik dei er i Noreg i dag, med den grunnleggande grammatikkundervisninga som mål. I lys av nyare grammatikkdidaktisk forsking drøftar vi kva grammatikk er, kva formålet med grammatikkundervisning bør vere, og kva pedagogiske rammer det bør byggast rundt. Vi viser blant anna til norsk didaktikkforsking som tar i bruk elevanes fleirspråklege ressursar i undervisning om grammatiske strukturar, til nederlandsk forsking som framhevar elevars bevisstheit om fleirtydigheit og oppøving av språkvitskapleg argumentasjon, og amerikansk didaktikkforsking som brukar grammatikkundervisninga for å lære elevar vitskapleg metode, noko som samtidig medfører positive haldningar til språkleg variasjon. Barn flest har ei naturleg interesse for språk som bør takast vare på for å fremje kunnskap om og engasjement for arbeid med språklege strukturar. For å få det til bør den grunnleggande grammatikkundervisninga i større grad bygge på den indre språkkompetansen elevane har med seg frå språk dei kan frå før, med talespråket som det primære studieobjektet, og skiljast meir frå skriveundervisninga, spesielt frå arbeid med rettskriving og andre normative tilnærmingar til språk.