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In:Studies in Övdalian Morphology and Syntax: New research on a lesser-known Scandinavian language
Edited by Kristine Bentzen, Henrik Rosenkvist and Janne Bondi Johannessen †
[Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today 221] 2015
► pp. 137–165

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The polyfunctionality of which in Övdalian

 | University of Tromsø – The Arctic University of Norway
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Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 3.0 license.

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Published online: 22 January 2015
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https://doi.org/10.1075/la.221.06van
The Övdalian wh-word ukin has a variety of syntactic uses, spanning from the canonical use as personal pronoun (‘who’) to predicative property querying item (‘what … like’) and polarity item introducing both main and embedded clauses. In this paper the various uses will be described and discussed, and it will be argued that the polyfunctionality of ukin can be well understood on the background of wh-syncretisms in other North Germanic varieties which all point in the direction of principled grammaticalization patterns in this domain. The pattern found will be accounted for by a nanosyntactic approach to lexicalization ranges.
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Cited by (2)

Cited by two other publications

Johannessen, Janne Bondi, Øystein Alexander Vangsnes, Joel Priestley & Kristin Hagen
2014. A multilingual speech corpus of North-Germanic languages. In Spoken Corpora and Linguistic Studies [Studies in Corpus Linguistics, 61], ► pp. 69 ff. DOI logo
Vangsnes, Øystein Alexander
2013. Syncretism and functional expansion in Germanic wh-expressions. Language Sciences 36 ► pp. 47 ff. DOI logo

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