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It's just not true that syntactic borrowing is that uncommon (google it). That means that the historically documented prolonged contact between Scandinavians an

It's just not true that syntactic borrowing is that uncommon (google it). That means that the historically documented prolonged contact between Scandinavians and the English had some effect on the grammar. No surprise there. Since syntactic borrowing is not uncommon in contact situations, it's a bad way to tell what language is descended from what other languages, so this proposal isn't off to a good start. You can strand prepositions (or verb particles, as we'd call them when they're not heads of clauses) in final position in German, contrary to their claim: Er stellt es auf "he sets it up". Off the top of my head I can name many ways that Scandinavian and English differ syntactically (forgive the jargon: you can Google it). 1) Many Scandinavian languages maintain a form of V2, where tensed main verb appears in 2nd position (defined syntactically); English lost it in the Middle English period. 2) Scandinavian lacks do-support (the presence of a dummy tensed auxiliary in certain contexts: "I don't want it", "Do you know?", etc.) where English has it. 3) Some Scandinavian languages have V-to-T movement (where temporal adverbs occur before verbs); English lost that a long time ago.

dsrguru 14y ago
> It's just not true that syntactic borrowing is that uncommon (google it). That means that the historically documented prolonged contact between Scandinavians and the English had some effect on the grammar. No surprise there. Since syntactic borrowing is not uncommon in contact situations, it's a bad way to tell what language is descended from what other languages, so this proposal isn't off to a good start. Agreed. An example is Japanese and Korean. They have virtually identical syntax, yet they are completely unrelated genetically. Outside of the vocabulary that they both borrowed from Middle Chinese, they have essentially no words in common.
dbaupp 14y ago
A question from someone who has only done a timy bit of linguistics: > 3) Some Scandinavian languages have V-to-T movement (where temporal adverbs occur before verbs); English lost that a long time ago. Is this like "Nu ska jag gå" (in Swedish)? If so, I don't understand that English lost it because "Now I will walk" is a fine translation.
- kylebgorman 14y ago
  A simple diagnostic for V-to-T movement is that an adverb occurs after the subject and a tensed verb. Compare French "Jean embarasse souvent Marie" to English "John often kisses Mary". Linguists have hypothesized since at least the 1950s that verbs are introduced into derivations at a position adjacent to their complements: if they occur between subject and temporal adverb, they presumably got their by raising (because syntax is a tree structure and both Scandinavian and English are largely head-initial, "earlier" in the sentence is also higher in the tree) from base position to the tense (T) position above verbs. Hence "V-to-T movement". If you want to learn which Scandinavian languages have V-to-T and which don't, and you can handle the jargon, check out this paper by Jonathan Bobaljik, a specialist in comparative Germanic syntax and prof at UConn: http://bobaljik.uconn.edu/papers/RealizingGI.pdf http://bobaljik.uconn.edu/papers/RealizingGI.pdf

dsrguru 14y ago

> It's just not true that syntactic borrowing is that uncommon (google it). That means that the historically documented prolonged contact between Scandinavians and the English had some effect on the grammar. No surprise there. Since syntactic borrowing is not uncommon in contact situations, it's a bad way to tell what language is descended from what other languages, so this proposal isn't off to a good start. Agreed. An example is Japanese and Korean. They have virtually identical syntax, yet they are completely unrelated genetically. Outside of the vocabulary that they both borrowed from Middle Chinese, they have essentially no words in common.

dbaupp 14y ago

A question from someone who has only done a timy bit of linguistics: > 3) Some Scandinavian languages have V-to-T movement (where temporal adverbs occur before verbs); English lost that a long time ago. Is this like "Nu ska jag gå" (in Swedish)? If so, I don't understand that English lost it because "Now I will walk" is a fine translation.

kylebgorman 14y ago
A simple diagnostic for V-to-T movement is that an adverb occurs after the subject and a tensed verb. Compare French "Jean embarasse souvent Marie" to English "John often kisses Mary". Linguists have hypothesized since at least the 1950s that verbs are introduced into derivations at a position adjacent to their complements: if they occur between subject and temporal adverb, they presumably got their by raising (because syntax is a tree structure and both Scandinavian and English are largely head-initial, "earlier" in the sentence is also higher in the tree) from base position to the tense (T) position above verbs. Hence "V-to-T movement". If you want to learn which Scandinavian languages have V-to-T and which don't, and you can handle the jargon, check out this paper by Jonathan Bobaljik, a specialist in comparative Germanic syntax and prof at UConn: http://bobaljik.uconn.edu/papers/RealizingGI.pdf http://bobaljik.uconn.edu/papers/RealizingGI.pdf