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In:Information Structure and Syntactic Change in Germanic and Romance Languages
Edited by Kristin Bech and Kristine Gunn Eide
[Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today 213] 2014
► pp. 173–200

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The cognitive status of null subject referents in Old Norse and their Modern Norwegian counterparts

 | University of Oslo
Published online: 7 May 2014
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https://doi.org/10.1075/la.213.07kin
This paper investigates the distribution of pronouns in Old Norse and Modern Norwegian, focusing mainly on Old Norse referential null subjects and their counterparts in Modern Norwegian. The theoretical starting point is the Givenness Hierarchy of Gundel et al. (1993), which predicts that null and unstressed pronouns can only be used appropriately if their referents have the cognitive status in focus, meaning, in short, that their referents must be “[…] at the current center of attention” (Gundel et al. 1993: 279). I will argue that the referents of Old Norse null subjects are not necessarily in focus, whereas Modern Norwegian unstressed subject pronouns seem to require this. I will propose an analysis of Old Norse null subjects whereby cognitive status is supplemented by semantic and morphological factors.
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Cited by (4)

Cited by four other publications

Rusten, Kristian A.
2019. Referential Null Subjects in Early English, DOI logo
Farasyn, Melissa & Anne Breitbarth
2016. Nullsubjekte im Mittelniederdeutschen. Beiträge zur Geschichte der deutschen Sprache und Literatur 138:4 ► pp. 524 ff. DOI logo
Kinn, Kari
2016. Referential vs. non-referential null subjects in Middle Norwegian. Nordic Journal of Linguistics 39:3 ► pp. 277 ff. DOI logo
Kinn, Kari, Kristian A. Rusten & George Walkden
2016. Null Subjects in Early Icelandic. Journal of Germanic Linguistics 28:1 ► pp. 31 ff. DOI logo

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