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Old Norse as an NP Language: With Observations on the Common Norse and Northwest Germanic Runic Inscriptions
Author(s) -
Lander Eric T.,
Haegeman Liliane
Publication year - 2014
Publication title -
transactions of the philological society
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.333
H-Index - 26
eISSN - 1467-968X
pISSN - 0079-1636
DOI - 10.1111/1467-968x.12022
Subject(s) - linguistics , germanic languages , ergative case , word order , history , mathematics , transitive relation , philosophy , german , combinatorics
The differences between languages with definite determiners and those without definite determiners have been the object of much research. Recently, Bošković has uncovered a number of one‐ and two‐way syntactic generalizations which serve to set these two typological groups apart. He accounts for the contrasts observed by proposing that languages with definite determiners (‘ DP ’ languages) have a DP layer, while determiner‐less languages (‘ NP ’ languages) lack this DP projection altogether. Since the Old Germanic languages did not have fully grammaticalized definite articles, a reasonable hypothesis to explore might be that they were NP languages in Bošković's sense. In this paper we explore this hypothesis, focusing mainly on Old Norse; where possible we also discuss Old Norse's historical predecessors Common Norse and Northwest Germanic (both of which are attested exclusively in runic inscriptions). The specific NP properties considered in this paper are (A) the absence of a fully grammaticalized definite article, (B) syntactic discontinuities and free word order, (C) the absence of double adnominal genitives with transitive deverbal nouns, (D) the absence of clitic doubling and (E) the presence of radical argument drop. The paper's approach is guided by basic generative assumptions, but its focus is descriptive rather than theoretical.