H3: Scandinavian syntax in a multilingual setting
Principal investigator: Prof. Dr. Kurt Braunmüller
Research assistants: Dr. Steffen Höder
Student assistants: Jasmin Bliesemann, Ilka Wantia
Research topics
This project deals with the syntactic change in the Continental Scandinavian languages from the oldest Runic inscriptions (ca. 2nd – 8th century) to Early Modern Danish and Swedish. The guiding questions of the project are as follows:- Which role does the contact between Scandinavian and non-Scandinavian languages play in the diachronic development of Scandinavian syntax?
- How can we account for the influence of culturally dominating groups of multilingual speakers/writers in language change?
- To what extent is the impact of language contact between genetically closely related languages different from other types of contact?
As is shown in sociolinguistic and contact typological research, bilinguals make use of diasystematic variation in order to reduce the syntactic divergence between the two languages, e.g. by minimising existing differences in word order. Because of the close genetic relationship between Scandinavian and German varieties on the one hand and because of the rather free word order in Latin, similar processes may have lead to syntactic change in the respective contact situations, especially regarding constituent order in clauses and within the nominal phrase.
In the first two years of the project (2002–2004), it could be argued plausibly for the influence of bilingual speakers on the language of the oldest Runic inscriptions, e.g. regarding the types of text and certain figures of speech. Furthermore, it could be shown that there was little difference between the word order in the Runic inscriptions and post-classical (colloquial) Latin.
Currently, the influence of Middle Low German and Medieval Latin on the word order in Continental Scandinavian main and subordinate clauses is investigated, especially with respect to the position of the finite verb. Here, the project studies the direct and indirect impact of Latin-German-Scandinavian multilingualism on the one hand and of a classical language, Latin, on the other on the diachronic development of Continental Scandinavian syntax.