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Does Norwegian Have a FOR Complementizer?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 December 2008

André Hantson
Affiliation:
Départment d'anglais. FNDP, 61 Rue de Bruxelles, B – 5000 NAMUR, Belgium.
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Abstract

Western, Jespersen and Vinje have called attention to the occurence in Norwegian of a for complementizer, which, like its English counterpart, introduces infinitive clauses with an overt subject. This paper attempts to find out whether the for that occurs in various types of sentences containing a for + NP + å infinitive sequence can really be analysed as a complementizer. The conclusion is that this Norwegian for is a squishy category: though most of the syntactic and semantic facts conflict with a complemtizer analysos, there is some interesting semantic and syntactic evidence (viz. a violation of the verb second constraint) that argues in favour of complementizer status.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1983

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References

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