Abstracts

Jürg Fleischer (Humboldt University Berlin)
Gender-insensitive possessive sīn/sein in German(ic) -- (link to presentation)
      For Germanic, a gender-insensitive reflexive possessive *sīn is reconstructed (Harbert 2007: 201, Fulk 2018: 189): It can anaphorically refer to possessors of any gender, including feminine. This state of affairs is preserved in Gothic, Old Norse, and the modern Scandinavian languages.
      In West Germanic, other systems are prevalent. Only Old English displays traces of the Germanic system (Bauer 1963, Mitchell 1985: 119), but predominantly displays new possessive pronouns (genitives in origin) otherwise, while the continental languages have preserved *sīn, which is restricted to masculine and neuter possessors. However, there are examples of German sīn/sein referring to feminine possessors in various stages and text types, which will be discussed thoroughly.

Anne Mette Nyvad (Aarhus University)
Are adjunct clauses not real islands in English and Danish? -- (link to presentation)
      Adjunct clauses have traditionally been assumed to be strong islands for extraction across languages, originally based on data from English. However, the universal island status of adjunct clauses has been challenged by reports that the Mainland Scandinavian languages allow extraction from finite adjuncts, findings which call for a re-evaluation of the situation in English regarding the islandhood of adjunct clauses. In order to adequately assess whether English finite adjunct clauses really are uniformly strong islands, we conducted an acceptability judgment study that tested extraction in the form of relativization from three different types of finite adjunct clauses in English (if-, when- and because-clauses) in the presence of supporting context. We found that the three types of adjunct clauses showed acceptability pattern which varied as a function of the choice of complementizer. This finding is difficult to explain with a purely syntactic account and suggests that extra-grammatical factors may be key in understanding island effects.

Eva Skafte Jensen (Danish Language Board/Dansk Sprognævn)
Adnominal or adverbial? -- (link to presentation)
      In Modern Standard Danish, adverbs based on adjectives take a -t: adj. langsom ’slow’ : adv. langsom-t ‘slowly’; adj. omhyggelig ‘careful’ : adv. omhyggelig-t ‘carefully’ etc. In the beginning of the 19th century, adverbs based on adjectives most often did not take such a -t. On the surface, the -t-form coincide with the neuter form of adjectives and the forms without -t coincide with adjectives in the common gender. This presents an empirical as well as a methodological challenge. How do we know whether forms like langsom and omhyggeligt in the 19th century are used adnominally or adverbially? In this paper, issues like these are discussed.

Sten Vikner (Aarhus University)
Perfect auxiliaries with reflexive objects: have vs. be -- (link to hand-out)
      I will try to update the analysis of Vikner & Sprouse 1988 and of Vikner 1990 that in languages with auxiliary selection like Danish, German, French and Italian, be is used as the auxiliary to form perfect tenses when the perfect auxiliary is positioned between two DPs with the same index. I will show how this works for unaccusative vs. unergative verbs, and then go on to show how it also may provide an analysis of why in French and Italian be can even be the perfect auxiliary with transitive verbs, provided that the object is reflexive.

Theresa Biberauer (University of Cambridge)
Kroondal German: a new South African window on long-term language contact -- (link to presentation)
      Kroondal German (KG) is a matrilectal, sixth-generation South African German variety spoken in the North-west Province. Its origins are in the northern German of Kroondal’s missionary founders, but Standard German has remained a consistently significant component in the linguistic competence of KG-speakers. This distinguishes Kroondal from most other German heritage-language contexts. Afrikaans and, increasingly, English are the major contact languages. Here I introduce some salient morphosyntactic properties documented in on-going empirical work, and consider these against the backdrop of contemporary understanding of the factors shaping contact varieties.

Ken Ramshøj Christensen (Aaarhus University)
The frequent good, the complex bad, and the unacceptable ugly -- (link to presentation)
      It is sometimes argued that the corpus frequency of a sentence type determines how easy it is to process and hence, how acceptable it is to native speakers. In this talk, I present results from an acceptability survey on a range of sentence types in Danish with varying levels of structural complexity and frequency. The results show that although frequency and acceptability are correlated, zero and near-zero frequencies do not predict acceptability. Furthermore, there is an even stronger but negative correlation between acceptability and complexity, defined as a function of independently motivated factors of syntactic structure and processing, including embedding, adjunction, extraction, and distance between filler and gap.