Word order in subordinate clauses: A corpus-based study of spoken informal and written formal Faroese

TY - JOUR

T1 - Word order in subordinate clauses: A corpus-based study of spoken informal and written formal Faroese

AU - Nyholm Debess, Iben

AU - Kühl, Karoline

PY - 2018/7

Y1 - 2018/7

N2 - The paper presents a comprehensive investigation into word order in Faroese subordinate clauses, specifically with regard to the placement of a sentence adverbial (V-Adv vs. Adv-V), based on three corpora of Faroese language (approximately 724,000 tokens). Word order in subordinate clauses has been the issue of much recent research in Insular and Mainland Scandinavian. This paper provides new knowledge on Faroese in that it includes medial-conceptual differences in the analysis, i.e. written vs. spoken language combined with differences in the degree of formality. The study also investigates a number of linguistic factors which have been claimed by previous studies to influence word order (namely clause type, verbal and verb type, presence of a conjunction, type of adverbial and the position of the subordinate clause in the main clause) and two sociodemographic factors, i.e. ‘age’ and ‘geographical area’. The paper concludes that the V-Adv word order is by no means as rare as previously claimed and that it tends to occur more in informal spoken language, in nominal clauses, with bridge verbs and without an introducing conjunction

AB - The paper presents a comprehensive investigation into word order in Faroese subordinate clauses, specifically with regard to the placement of a sentence adverbial (V-Adv vs. Adv-V), based on three corpora of Faroese language (approximately 724,000 tokens). Word order in subordinate clauses has been the issue of much recent research in Insular and Mainland Scandinavian. This paper provides new knowledge on Faroese in that it includes medial-conceptual differences in the analysis, i.e. written vs. spoken language combined with differences in the degree of formality. The study also investigates a number of linguistic factors which have been claimed by previous studies to influence word order (namely clause type, verbal and verb type, presence of a conjunction, type of adverbial and the position of the subordinate clause in the main clause) and two sociodemographic factors, i.e. ‘age’ and ‘geographical area’. The paper concludes that the V-Adv word order is by no means as rare as previously claimed and that it tends to occur more in informal spoken language, in nominal clauses, with bridge verbs and without an introducing conjunction

KW - Faculty of Humanities

KW - færøsk

KW - ledstilling

KW - grammatik

KW - Sprogforskning

M3 - Journal article

SN - 0332-5865

JO - Nordic Journal of Linguistics

JF - Nordic Journal of Linguistics

ER -