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Object Shift in spoken Mainland Scandinavian: A corpus study of Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 September 2013

Kristine Bentzen ,
Merete Anderssen  and
Christian Waldmann
Kristine Bentzen
Affiliation:
Department of Language and Linguistics, University of Tromsø, N-9037 Tromsø, Norway. kristine.bentzen@uit.no
Merete Anderssen
Affiliation:
Department of Language and Linguistics, University of Tromsø, N-9037 Tromsø, Norway. merete.anderssen@uit.no
Christian Waldmann
Affiliation:
Department of Language Studies, Umeå University, SE-901 87 Umeå, Sweden. christian.waldmann@nord.umu.se
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Abstract

Recent work on Object Shift (OS) suggests that this is not as uniform an operation as traditionally assumed. In this paper, we examine OS in the spontaneous speech of adults in large Danish, Norwegian and Swedish child language corpora in order to explore variation with respect to OS across these three languages. We evaluate our results against three recent strands of accounts of OS, namely a prosodic/phonological account, an account in terms of cognitive status, and an account in terms of information structure. Our investigation shows that there is both within-language and across-language variation in the application of OS, and that the three accounts can explain some of our data. However, all accounts are faced with challenges, especially when explaining exceptional cases.

Keywords

cognitive statuscorpus dataDanishinformation structureNorwegianObject Shiftprosodyreferencereferential accessibilitySwedishtopics
Type
Research Article
Information
Nordic Journal of Linguistics , Volume 36 , Special Issue 2: Object Shift in the Nordic Languages , October 2013 , pp. 115 - 151
Copyright
Copyright © Nordic Association of Linguistics 2013 

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