Variable V2 in Norwegian heritage language

Abstract

This paper discusses possible attrition of verb second (V2) word order in Norwegian heritage language by investigating a corpus of spontaneous speech produced by 50 2nd–4th generation heritage speakers in North America. The study confirms previous findings that V2 word order is generally stable in heritage situations, but nevertheless finds approximately 10% V2 violations. The cases of non-V2 word order are argued to be due to lack of activation of the heritage language grammar, making it vulnerable to crosslinguistic influence from the speakers’ dominant language. This crosslinguistic influence does not simply replace V2 by non-V2, but is argued to operate more indirectly, affecting (a) the distribution of contexts for V2 word order, and (b) introducing two new distinctions into the heritage language, one (indirectly) based on a similar distinction in the dominant language (a difference between adverbs and negation with respect to verb movement), the other based on frequency of initial elements triggering V2 in non-subject-initial declaratives. Together, these findings also indicate that crosslinguistic influence affects different contexts of V2 differently, providing support for analyses that treat V2 word order as the result of many smaller rules.

Stability and Change in the C-Domain in American Swedish

“…We have observed 1.8% V2 violations in AmSw. A similar frequency has been noted for AmNo; Westergaard et al (2021) find 2.2% non-V2 in declaratives in the Norwegian part of CANS (N = 10.609). Some of these examples could, however, be interpreted as base-generated adjuncts (HTLD), possibly making the frequencies even more similar.…”

“…Previous studies of heritage Scandinavian in North America have also shown evidence of considerable stability (see Westergaard et al 2021 on AmNo; Kühl and Petersen 2018 on American Danish). These studies have not considered left dislocation, but Bousquette et al (2021) show some examples of CLD in AmNo, and we can easily find additional attestations in the AmNo part of CANS: Although the overall tendency in the C-domain in AmSw is stability, we have observed some differences between the heritage variety and the homeland baseline: there are scattered examples of non-V2 of a type that does not occur in the homeland variety, and there is an increase in the frequency of SV-order.…”

“…However, observe that there is less S-Neg-V than XSV-order; they interpret the low frequency of S-Neg-V as an argument for asymmetric V2 in Norwegian. With the additional data from Westergaard et al (2021), however, the argument is weakened, as SadvV-order is more common with other sentence adverbs than with negation (see Westergaard et al 2021, p. 22). As mentioned in Section 3, there are good reasons to assume that homeland Swedish has symmetric V2, and as we will see below, there is no reason to assume that heritage Swedish has innovated an asymmetric V2 system.…”

“…These languages are spoken by the descendants of emigrants that left Scandinavia mainly in the second half of the 19th century or the beginning of the 20th century. One of the areas that has spurred particular interest is the C-domain, including the V2 property; there are detailed studies of American Norwegian (AmNo) (Eide and Hjelde 2015;Larsson and Kinn 2021;Westergaard et al 2021; see also Bousquette et al 2021), American Danish (Kühl and Petersen 2018) and American Icelandic (AmIce) (Arnbjörnsdóttir et al 2018). 1 In this article we introduce American Swedish (AmSw) into the discussion of the C-domain in heritage Scandinavian.…”

Variability and learning in language change: The case of V2

“…See alsoWestergaard, Lohndal & Lundquist (2021) for evidence of the relationship between the production of non-subject-initial declaratives and V2 errors in heritage speakers of Norwegian living in the USA.…”