Hans-Olav Enger
List of John Benjamins publications in which Hans-Olav Enger is involved.
2021 The loss of inflection as grammar complication: Evidence from Mainland Scandinavian Diachronica 38:1, pp. 111–150 | Article
The loss of inflectional categories is often thought of as a type of simplification. In this paper we present a survey of phenomena involving the reduction of adjective agreement in Scandinavian, using examples from Norwegian, and discuss their diachronic origins, including a new account of the… read more
2019 Thoughts on morphomes, on a Scandinavian background Morphological Variation: Theoretical and empirical perspectives, Dammel, Antje and Oliver Schallert (eds.), pp. 159–196 | Chapter
Since Aronoff (1994), the notion of morphomic patterns, i.e. inflectional patterns without complete motivation from outside of morphology, has gained popularity, especially in works on Romance (e.g. Maiden 2016a). However, the approach has also been criticized. Bowern (2015) suggests that there is… read more
2018 Making sense of grammatical variation in Norwegian Reorganising Grammatical Variation: Diachronic studies in the retention, redistribution and refunctionalisation of linguistic variants, Dammel, Antje, Matthias Eitelmann and Mirjam Schmuck (eds.), pp. 209–230 | Chapter
This study examines two examples of grammatical variation in Norwegian inflection, strong versus weak verb conjugation and affixal versus periphrastic adjective comparison. The main claim is that the choice of variants is not as arbitrary as one may think, which rather indicates a division of… read more
2014 Scandinavian pancake constructions as a family of constructions Cognitive Linguistic Studies 1:2, pp. 171–196 | Article
This paper deals with a classical problem in Scandinavian grammar, so-called ‘pancake sentences’, nicknamed after examples like Pannekaker er godt ‘Pancakes are good’ where there seemingly is disagreement between the plural subject and the predicative adjective in the neuter singular. Our aim is… read more
2013 Inflectional change, ‘sound laws’ and the autonomy of morphology: The case of Scandinavian case and gender reduction Diachronica 30:1, pp. 1–26 | Article
Traditional views of inflectional changes often run as follows: A morphological opposition expressed by affixes is disturbed by sound changes. It is then left to morphology to ‘clean up the mess’; morphology is merely reactive. If, however, morphology can operate “by itself” (Aronoff 1994,… read more
2004 On the relation between gender and declension: A diachronic perspective from Norwegian Studies in Language 28:1, pp. 51–82 | Article
This paper examines the relation between gender and declension in Norwegian. Traditionally, one has assumed that genders are the basis for predicting declensions in that language. More recently, it has been suggested that declensions are the basis for predicting genders — in all languages that… read more
2002 21. Morphological splits Iconicity and Optimality Morphology 2000: Selected papers from the 9th Morphology Meeting, Vienna, 24–28 February 2000, Bendjaballah, Sabrina, Wolfgang U. Dressler, Oskar E. Pfeiffer and Maria D. Voeikova (eds.), pp. 271–282 | Chapter