This article investigates the morphosyntactic status of dative case in Norwegian, Icelandic, and Faroese. We hypothesize that these three languages represent three diachronic stages signalled synchronically by the degree of preservation or non-preservation of dative under movement. Thus, we explore the synchronic status of dative under passive movement and topicalization in the three languages, while simultaneously paying attention to the larger questions of diachronic preservation and non-preservation of dative. We suggest that our findings have interesting ramifications for the categorization of case as structural and non-structural in generative grammar.

The American Midwest is an area that stretches over huge distances. Yet it seems that the Norwegian language in this whole area has some similarities, particularly at the lexical level. Comparisons of three types of vocabulary across the whole area, as well as across time, building on accounts in the previous literature from Haugen (1953) onwards, are carried out. The results of these comparisons convince the authors that it is justified to refer to this language as one lexically defined dialect, which we call lexicolect.

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I denne artikkelen undersøker vi åssen et utvalg norsklærere fra barnetrinnet til videregående skole rapporterer at de praktiserer grammatikkundervisning. Datamaterialet er refleksjons-tekster skrevet av lærere som tok videreutdanning i norsk ved to forskjellige høyere utdanningsinstitusjoner. Vi stiller to forskningsspørsmål: Hvilke deler av grammatikken rapporterer lærerne at de underviser i, og hvilke arbeidsmåter rapporterer de at de bruker? Funnene viser at ordklasser tar mye plass i grammatikkundervisninga, både på barne- og ungdomstrinnet, mens syntaks får større plass hos VGS-lærerne. På barnetrinnet er bevegelse og spill den mest brukte arbeidsmåten, mens det sammenlignende perspektivet gis noe større plass på ungdomstrinnet og særlig på VGS. Det ser ut til å være en viss mangel på progresjon mellom barnetrinnet og ungdomstrinnet. Vi mener at funnene våre viser at en bør etterstrebe å gi studentene et mer deskriptivt syn på grammatikk, slik at de kan oppdage at grammatikken er noe man kan samtale om og utforske.

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.