{"id":1316,"date":"2022-06-13T14:10:40","date_gmt":"2022-06-13T14:10:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/?p=1316"},"modified":"2022-09-28T14:47:10","modified_gmt":"2022-09-28T14:47:10","slug":"defectivity-norwegian","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/defectivity-norwegian\/","title":{"rendered":"Defectivity in Norwegian"},"content":{"rendered":"

[This is part of a small but growing series of defectivity case studies<\/a>.]<\/p>\n

Icelandic is not the only Scandinavian language to exhibit defectivity in imperatives<\/a>: Rice (2003, 2004; henceforth R) describes a superficially similar pattern of defectivity in Norwegian adjectives.<\/p>\n

In Norwegian, the infinitival form of most verbs consists of the particle \u00e5<\/em>, the verb stem, and a schwa\u00a0(which, like in German, is spelled -e<\/em>). Such verbs’ imperatives then consists of the bare stem, without a particle or the schwa;\u00a0e.g., \u00e5 skrive<\/em> ‘to write’\/skriv\u00a0<\/em>‘write!’. A second, smaller class of verbs are monosyllables ending in a (non-schwa) vowel. These verbs use the bare verb stem in both infinitive and imperative; e.g., \u00e5 tre<\/em> ‘to step’\/tre\u00a0<\/em>‘step!’. While R does not go into any details about how these two patterns might be encoded, one might posit two allomorphs of the infinitive suffix,\u00a0-e<\/em> and zero. Presumably this allomorphy is in part lexically conditioned, since it seems necessary to distinguish between minimal pairs like \u00e5 vie<\/em> ‘to dedicate’\/vi<\/em> ‘dedicate!’, which belongs to the former class, and\u00a0\u00e5 si\u00a0<\/em>‘to say’\/si<\/em> ‘say!’, which belongs to the latter. However, R only gives a few examples of vowel-final monosyllable with infinitive in -e<\/em> (all other verbs of this shape have zero infinitives), so it’s possible these are just exceptions and the allomorphy conditioning is mostly phonological.<\/p>\n

A third class of verbs are those whose stem ends in a rising-sonority consonant cluster; e.g., \u00e5pne<\/em> ‘to open’, sykle<\/em> ‘to bike’.1 <\/sup>These superficially resemble the first class of verbs (e.g., \u00e5 skrive<\/em>) in that they end in a schwa in the infinitive. However, Norwegian does not permit rising sonority codas, so the expected *\u00e5pn<\/em>, *sykl<\/em>, and so on are ill-formed.<\/p>\n

According to R, some speakers simply use circumlocutions to avoid the imperative of such verbs, making this a standard case of defectivity. However, R mentions several other strategies used by Norwegian speakers:2<\/sup><\/p>\n