What kind of Scandinavian? On interrogative noun phrases across North Germanic

Nor Jnl Ling 31.2, 227–251 C© 2008 Cambridge University Press doi:10.1017/S0332586508001947Printed in the United Kingdom

Vangsnes, Øystein Alexander. 2008. What kind of Scandinavian?On interrogative noun phrases across North Germanic. Nordic Journal ofLinguistics 31.2, 227–251.

What kind of Scandinavian? On interrogativenoun phrases across North Germanic

Øystein Alexander Vangsnes

A central objective of this paper is to show how much variation there is across Scandinavianwith respect to the morphosyntactic form of interrogative noun phrases. The presentpaper focuses on three main types of such DPs: (i) phrases involving a cognate ofEnglish which, (ii) phrases involving the same element as manner ‘how’ (which ismorphologically complex and distinct from degree ‘how’), and (iii) phrases involving‘what’ with or without an overt KIND noun. With respect to all of these different typesof noun-phrase-internal wh-expressions an interesting pattern seems to emerge: there arereasons to hold that adnominal wh-expressions start out as modifiers, yielding KIND-querying noun phrases, and then develop into determiners, yielding TOKEN-queryingnoun phrases. Although further investigations will have to determine whether such adevelopmental path (or cycle) is quite general in nature, it can be made perfect senseof with reference to grammaticalization triggered by wh-movement which operates on aDP-structure that distinguishes modification from determination in such a way that thelocus of determination is higher than modification.

Keywords adnominal cycle, dialect syntax, DP syntax, KIND vs. TOKEN readings, micro-comparative syntax, Scandinavian, wh-determiners, wh-nominals

Øystein Alexander Vangsnes, Faculty of Humanities, University of TromsP, NO-9037 TromsP,

Norway

[email protected]

1. INTRODUCTION

Different varieties of Scandinavian use different kinds of expressions to query forKIND, i.e. expressions which can be used on a par with English what kind of N,henceforth referred to as ‘wh-modification’. There is also variation as to theexpressions used to query for TOKEN, i.e. expressions corresponding to English whichN, henceforth referred to as ‘wh-determination’. Moreover, certain expressions canin certain varieties be used to query for both KIND and TOKEN as is arguably the casefor English adnominal what.

A basic test to distinguish wh-modification from wh-determination can beillustrated by the English examples in (1) and (2).

(1) What kind of car do you have? (Q for KIND)A: A station wagon.B: #The station wagon.

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(2) Which car is yours? (Q for TOKEN)A: #A station wagon.B: The station wagon.

The point here is that the B answer in (1) is infelicitous since it picks out a particularreferent, a token, rather than a kind of something. The query is for the properties thatcharacterize the referent rather than the referent itself. On the other hand, in (2) theB answer is quite appropriate whereas A is not. The indefinite noun phrase fails torefer to a particular car, which is the query induced by the which-phrase.

In the syntactic literature, which-phrases have been characterized by the notionD-linking (Pesetsky 1987), for DISCOURSE LINKING, which in essence says that suchD-linked wh-expressions presuppose a set of referents of the kind determined by thenoun (and modifiers) of the noun phrase. My choice of the label ‘wh-determination’emphasizes the DP-internal properties of the wh-word: the idea is that which andits equivalents are determiners akin to definite/specific articles and relate to thereferential part of the functional sequence of a noun. The label ‘wh-modification’for expressions like what kind of, on the other hand, signals that they relate to theintensional part of the extended noun phrase, i.e. the part which hosts adjectives andother modifiers – constituents which contribute to defining the sense of the nounphrase as a whole. (The syntactic status of wh-modification will be slightly adjustedbelow.)

Bare adnominal what seems to be compatible with queries for both KIND andTOKEN, at least by the tests set up here.

(3) What car do you have? (Q for KIND)A: A station wagon.B: #The station wagon.

(4) What car is yours? (Q for TOKEN)A: #A station wagon.B: The station wagon.

Adnominal what can thus be both a determiner and a modifier.Notice that the test set up here is not watertight. KIND interpretations can be

coerced in the TOKEN context as in, for example, ‘Landrover is definitely my kind ofcar. What kind of car is yours?’. Furthermore, which can quite appropriately occur inthe KIND context used here, but notice that the query would require a different kindof answer.

(5) Which car do you have? (Q for KIND)A: #A station wagon.B: A Landrover.C: The Landrover.

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Rather than querying for a certain kind of car, the question now queries for a particularbrand or model of cars, in which the indefinite noun phrase in the B alternative wouldbe an appropriate answer. We can relate this to the D-linking property of which:a more or less salient list of car models will function as the presupposed set fromwhich the which-phrase picks one item. Thus, a token is identified, but then to a classrather than to an individual token. We may label queries of this kind ‘list queries’,and whereas the indefinite KIND answer a station wagon is infelicitous in (5), theindefinite LIST answer a Landrover is quite appropriate.

Notice that the definite description in the C alternative in (5) entails what wemay consider the regular use of which: the query now presupposes a set of givencars, not models or brands, out of which one should be picked. (This readingbecomes clearer if, for instance, the adverbial today is added to the question in (5).)Interrogative DPs with what or what kind of may of course also be used to query formodels/brands, and this conceptual area appears to be one where wh-determinationand wh-modification conflate.

In any event, the following generalization is convenient as far as the referentialproperties of English adnominal wh-expressions are concerned.

(6) what kind of = +KINDq

which = −KINDq

what = ±KINDq

Although wh-modification and wh-determination can conflate conceptually as wellas morphologically, there seems to be one striking formal difference between the twocategories of interrogative DPs: query for KIND is incompatible with cardinality andcannot, for instance, be combined with a numeral that scopes over the modified noun,as illustrated in (7a). Cardinality is not barred from occurring in the wh-modifier asshown in (7b), but in that case the scope of the cardinality will be internal to themodifier. Combining a wh-determiner of the which-type is fine, as evident from (7c).

(7) a. ∗What kind of three cars do you have?b. What three kinds of cars do you have?c. Which three cars are yours?

Without going into a formal semantic account on this restriction on KINDq, I willtake this observation to be indicative of the structural status of wh-modifiers, namelythat they occupy the same position/domain as numerals and that it can be considereda sort of classifier along the lines proposed in Vangsnes (1999:92f., 2001:293f.)for container expressions like a glass of, etc. As for wh-determiners I will argue thatthey relate to the same position/domain as definite determiners, which is higher in thefunctional sequence than that of cardinal/classifying expressions. Following standardterminology I will label the former DP, and following Julien (2005) I will label thelatter CardP (corresponding to NumP in Vangsnes 1999, 2001).

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I will let these introductory remarks suffice as a background for investigating theways in which wh-DPs are formed across Scandinavian varieties. The main objectiveof the paper is to display the rich (micro)variation we find in this domain and also toshow how dynamic a grammatical field we are dealing with.

The structure of the paper is as follows. In section 2, I will give a quick overviewof the variation across Scandinavian languages. In section 3, I will discuss wh-determiners of the ‘which’-type as well as other types. In section 4, I will turn to thewidespread adnominal use of manner ‘how’, that is to say the adnominal use of thesame wh-expression as is used at the clausal level to query for manner (Vangsnes2008a, b). In section 5, I will discuss adnominal wh-expressions which involve‘what’, which can occur with the preposition ‘for’, an overt KIND noun combinedwith a genitive formative, and with the indefinite article.

One picture that will emerge during the exposition is that the various expressiontypes may seem to involve a development from being +KINDq to becoming ±KINDq,and eventually sometimes even –KINDq, a development either witnessed throughhistorical facts or by virtue of contemporary dialectal variation. This may suggest thatsuch adnominal wh-expressions are subject to a grammaticalization cycle wherebymodification is extended to determination. Section 6 develops a proposal whichcaptures some of the key points of the previous sections and which at the sametime seeks to account for the putative grammaticalization cycle. This section alsoconcludes the paper.

Discovering such a cycle is quite fascinating, and moreover it can be made perfectsense of by current syntactic theory given the structural assumptions made above: asin most other Western European languages wh-expressions normally move to the leftperiphery (of both clauses and DPs) in Scandinavian, and given that a wh-modifierwill move past the determiner layer of a noun phrase, it can readily be (re-)associatedwith the latter. In very general terms we can describe the development as a changefrom the scheme in (8a) to the one in (8b), where KP is the noun-phrase-internalcorrelate of CP in clauses.

(8) a. [KP whi [DP [CardP ti [NP (wh-modification)b. [KP whi [DP ti [CardP [NP (wh-determination)

Let us then quickly go through some of the kinds of adnominal wh-expressions thatwe encounter in Scandinavian before we return to study them in more detail.

2. SCANDINAVIAN ADNOMINAL WH-EXPRESSIONS:

AN OVERVIEW

First of all, all of the standard, written Mainland Scandinavian varieties exceptNynorsk Norwegian have a cognate of English which, (h)vilken, which, as we willsee later, uniquely entails queries for TOKEN, like its English counterpart.

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(9) a. Hvilken bil er din? Danish and Bokmal Norwegianwhich car is yours

b. Vilken bil ar din? Swedishwhich car is yours

Second, we find a KIND-querying expression involving an overt KIND nounfollowed by the linker element -s, otherwise found in genitive constructions. The KIND

noun can in some Mainland Scandinavian varieties be preceded by the prepositionfor/for ‘for’, and on this issue we see some interesting variation across the varietieswhich will be discussed below. The most widespread combination of KIND noun pluslinker is slags. In Swedish we also find sorts. The -s element is glossed here as of.

(10) a. Kva slags kjøtt er dette? Nynorsk Norwegianwhat kind-of meat is this

b. Vad for slags kott ar detta? Swedishwhat for kind-of meat is this

c. Vad for sorts kott ar detta? Swedishwhat for sort-of meat is this

In Icelandic several KIND nouns are used in the corresponding cases, and both theKIND noun and the wh-word will always appear in the genitive singular.

(11) Hvers konar / hvers kyns / hvers slagswhat.GEN kind.GEN what.GEN gender.GEN what.GEN kind.GEN

kjot er þetta?meat is thisAll: ‘What kind of meat is this?’

Third, at least two of the standard(ized) varieties, Nynorsk Norwegian andcolloquial Danish, also allow the use of a bare ‘what’ in wh-DPs, and the combinationof ‘what’ with ‘for’ and the indefinite article seems to have a wider, overlappingdistribution. In Nynorsk Norwegian one encounters phrases of the three kindsillustrated in (11a), i.e. with either just kva ‘what’, kva for ‘what for’ or kva forein ‘what for a’. Crucially, the presence of the indefinite article is dependent on thepresence of for, as indicated by the ungrammatical example in (12b).

(12) a. Kva (for (ein)) bil har han? Nynorsk Norwegianwhat for a car has he

b. *Kva ein bil har han?what a car has he

The example(s) in (13) involve a typical KIND-querying context, but the same rangeof spelled-out structure can be found also in TOKEN-querying contexts.

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(13) a. Kva (for (ein)) dag er det i dag? Nynorsk Norwegianwhat for a day is it in day

b. *Kva ein dag er det i dag?what a day is it in day

In other words, the ‘what (for (a))’ determiner seems to correspond to English whatas well as to the German was fur construction in being neutral with respect to theKIND∼TOKEN distinction (see Leu 2008 and references provided there).

Fourth, across colloquial and dialectal Norwegian and colloquial Icelandic itis quite common to use the wh-item which corresponds to English manner ‘how’adnominally (cf. Vangsnes 2008a, b). It seems that for all of the varieties in question,manner ‘how’ is morphologically complex and crucially ‘bigger’ than degree ‘how’.This DP-internal use of manner ‘how’ can be illustrated by the following examplesfrom the TromsP dialect.

(14) a. Korsn bil har han? Tromsø NorwegianhowMNR car has he

b. Korsn dag e de i dag?howMNR day is it in day

c. Korsn ska du løse de probleme?howMNR shall you solve that problem.DEF

d. Kor gammel e han?howDEG old is he

Calling the wh-expression in question manner ‘how’ entails an a priori assumptionthat the manner adverb use is the primary one, but the important point is of coursethat we find the same (complex) wh-item in the two distinct syntactic contexts. The a-and b-examples here suggest that adnominal korsn in the TromsP dialect is ±KINDq.Dialects differ on this point, however, as we will see later.

Summarizing this far, we have at least four main types of adnominal wh-expressions for queries in Scandinavian: (i) a ‘which’ type expression, (i) a ‘what(for) kind of’ type, (iii) a ‘what for’ type, and (iv) a manner ‘how’ used adnominally.In the next section we will turn to Mainland Scandinavian (h)vilken and its cognatesas well as other TOKEN-querying determiners across the varieties. We will thenconsider the adnominal use of manner ‘how’ more closely before we turn to the twoclasses that involve ‘what’.

3. WH-DETERMINERS IN SCANDINAVIAN

3.1 Hvilken versus hvılıkr

As already mentioned, all the standard varieties of Mainland Scandinavian exceptNynorsk Norwegian possess a cognate of English which, namely (h)vilken. The

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cognateness of these items can be retrieved from (etymological) dictionaries, and wewill return to this etymology below.

Like its English counterpart, Mainland Scandinavian (h)vilken seems to uniquelyentail query for TOKEN. Consider the following example from Bokmal Norwegian; aquery for which day it is today is appropriately answered by one of the weekdays (asin A) or a specific date (as in B), but not by a description of what the day is like, forinstance, weatherwise (as in C).

(15) Hvilken dag er det i dag? Bokmal Norwegianwhich day is it in dayA: Mandag.

MondayB: 9. april.

9 AprilC: #En regnfull en.

a rainy one

Likewise a query for which car is yours requires a definite description in the answerrather than KIND-referring indefinite noun phrase.

(16) Hvilken bil er din? Bokmal Norwegianwhich car is yours

A: Den røde stasjonsvogna.the red station-wagon.DEF

B: #En rød stasjonsvogn.a red station-wagon

And using (h)vilken in a KIND-referring context entails a list query, as discussed inthe introduction: the B alternative in the following example would answer such a listquery, whereas the C alternative entails a regular TOKEN query where one item ispicked out of a presupposed set of specific cars. The indefinite noun phrase in the Aanswer is simply odd.

(17) Hvilken bil har du? Bokmal Norwegianwhich car have you

A: #En rød stasjonsvogn.a red station-wagon

B: En Landrover.a Landrover

C: Landroveren.Landrover.DEF

These Bokmal Norwegian examples can be paralleled by Swedish and Danishexamples, and hence Mainland Scandinavian (h)vilken seems to have the same basicproperties as English which.

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The Icelandic adnominal expression hvılıkur is obviously also cognate withwhich and (h)vilken, being almost identical to the Old Norse form, but unlike itscounterparts in the other contemporary Germanic languages, it cannot be used toform questions; its use seems to be restricted to exclamatives only. (The example in(18b) is due to Gunnar Hrafn Hrafnbjargarson, p.c.)

(18) a. *Hvılıkur bıll er þinn? Icelandicwhich car is yours

b. Hvılıkan kagga þu att!which wagon you have‘What a fancy car you have!’

In this respect it is of some importance to notice that in the older stages of Germanicthe which type wh-item was not uniquely TOKEN-querying. In fact, in both J. Fritznersordbok and Heggstad, HPdnebP & Simensen (1975), the adnominal use of hvılıkris listed as KIND-querying. Heggstad et al. (1975:213) gives the example in (19) toillustrate the KIND reading, and the non-normalized example in (20) excerpted fromthe MENOTA corpus1 also suggests that hvılıkr was KIND-querying.

(19) Ver heyrDum a hvılıkt prof E. let fram leiDa. Old Norsewe listended to ‘which’ proof E. let forth lead‘We listended to what (kind of) proof E. gave.’

(20) Ec hafDa aDr ætlat at ec skyllda syna ollum monnumI had other intended that I should show all menhue lik ast er mer leikr a þer. Old Norsehow like love that me plays on you‘I had wanted something else, that I should show everyone what (kind of)love I feel for you.’

The same KIND-querying property seems to have held also for the cognates of hvılıkrin other varieties of Old Germanic. Consider the following entry for which in TheConcise Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology:2

(21) The Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Etymologywhich †of what kind?; †what?; what one? OE.; as rel. adj. and pron. XII. OE.hwilc = OS. (h)wilik, MLG., MDu. wilk, ON. hvılıkr, corr. with a differentgrade to OE. hwelc = MDu. wel(i)c, walc, OHG. hwelıh, Goth. hvileiks;Gmc. formation on *χwa- *χwe- (see WHO) and *lıka- body, form; cf.EACH, SUCH.

Notice here that the sense ‘of what kind?’ is listed as an antiquated meaning for which.Moreover, we see that the etymology is a combination of an (instrumental/dative)

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GLOSS ‘which’ ‘shot’ ‘a/one(s)’ ‘yellow’ ‘open’ -DEF

COM vilk-en skjut-en e-n gul opp-en -enN vilk-et skjut-et e-tt gul-t opp-et -etPL vilk-a skjut-na e-na gul-a opp-na -na

Table 1. The inflection of ‘which’, past participles, the indefinite article/‘one’, regular strong

adjectives, participial adjectives, and the definite suffix in Swedish.

GLOSS ‘which’ ‘shot’ ‘one(s)’ ‘yellow’ ‘open’ -DEF

M, NOM, SG hvılık-ur skot-inn ei-nn gul-ur op-inn -innM, ACC, SG hvılık-an skot-inn ei-nn gul-an op-inn -(i)nnM, DAT, SG hvılık-um skot-num ei-num gul-um op-num -(i)numM, GEN, SG hvılık-s skot-ins ei-ns gul-s op-ins -(i)nsM, NOM, PL hvılık-ir skot-nir ei-nir gul-ir op-nir -nirM, ACC, PL hvılık-a skot-na ei-na gul-a op-na -naM, DAT, PL hvılık-um skot-num ei-num gul-um op-num -numM, GEN, PL hvılık-ra skot-inna ei-nna gul-ra op-inna -na

Table 2. The inflection of ‘which’, past participles, ‘one’, regular strong adjectives, participial

adjectives, and the definite suffix in the masculine in Icelandic.

form of who/what plus a noun meaning ‘body’ in Proto-Germanic,3 and Webster(1913) has the following comment on this etymology: ‘hence properly, of what sortor kind’.

In other words, it seems that which and its counterpart in Mainland Scandinavianhas gone through a development from being KIND-querying to becoming TOKEN-querying. In Icelandic, on the other hand, the corresponding element has lost itsquerying capacity and is only retained in a particular non-interrogative context, stillclearly with a KIND-referring capacity. This historical development will be of greatimportance later on.4

There are furthermore significant morphological differences between theMainland Scandinavian (h)vilken and the Old Norse/Icelandic hvılık(u)r. First ofall, we notice a difference in the stems with -(h)vilk- versus -hvılık-. Second, andmore importantly, the Mainland Scandinavian expression can be argued to inflectlike the indefinite article, participles, participial adjectives (like ‘open’), and thedefinite article, whereas the Old Norse/Icelandic expression inflects like a strong(non-participial) adjective. This is illustrated by tables 1 and 2 for Swedish andIcelandic, respectively.5 The inflectional difference is most evident when we compareSwedish with the nominative and accusative singular and the genitive plural forms inIcelandic. The two morphological differences between Mainland Scandinavian andON/Icelandic may suggest that the historical origin of (h)vilken is more complex

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Swedish (site:se) Danish (site:dk) Norwegian (site:no)

vilka/hvilke 780 689 667vilkna/hvilkne 50 148 138vilkena/hvilkene 20 90 166Total 850 927 971

Table 3. Plural forms of (h)vilken across Mainland Scandinavian (Google search).

and that it is not a direct descendant from Old Norse. Given the well-knownmassive impact from Low German on Scandinavian from the late Middle Agesand onwards (see Jahr 1998, 2000), one may in fact envisage that the expression isflavored by the corresponding welk in Low German (and Dutch) to give the stem(h)vilk-.

The inflectional difference is not perfect in that the Swedish plural form vilkapatterns with the adjectival inflection in being marked with the formative -a and not-na as in the other classes. The same discrepancy holds for Bokmal Norwegian andDanish, where we find the plural form hvilk-e rather than, for example, hvilk-ne.

Interestingly, however, the non-sanctioned forms vilkna/vilkena for Swedish andhvilkne/hvilkene for Norwegian and Danish are far from infrequent in texts found onthe Internet. Table 3 presents the (uncontrolled) results of a Google search.6

These unsanctioned forms better conform to the general morphological patternfor (h)vilken found in the singular, and according to the figures in table 3, they makeup around 8% for Swedish, 15% for Danish, and 31% for Norwegian of the totalnumbers, and we may then more readily ask what the status of this inflection is.

One thought that springs to mind given the TOKEN-querying property of MainlandScandinavian (h)vilken is that the inflection IS in fact the definite suffix. The examplesin (22) and (23) elaborate on the morphological similarity of the elements.

(22) a. vilk-en bil (23) a. bil-en Swedishwhich-COM.SG car car-COM.SG

b. vilk-et hus b. hus-etwhich-N.SG house house-N.SG

c. vilk-((e)n)a bil-ar c. bil-ar-nawhich-PL car-s car-s-PL

The proposal is slightly problematic with respect to (Bokmal) Norwegian for tworeasons: (i) there exists no singular feminine form ∗hvilk-a corresponding to, forinstance, bok-a ‘the book’, and (ii) the final -t of the neuter singular hvilk-et ispronounced unlike the (spelled) final -t of the definite suffixed article. This isillustrated by the following paradigm pair where the imbalance in the feminineand neuter is evident from the b- and c-examples.

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(24) a. hvilk-en bil (25) a. bil-en Norwegianwhich-M.SG car car-M.SG

b. hvilk-en bok b. bok-awhich-F.SG car car-F.SG

c. hvilk-et hus c. hus-ewhich-N.SG house house-N.SG

d. hvilk-((e)n)e bil-er d. bil-e-newhich-PL car-s car-s-PL

However, there are reasons to believe that hvilken has a special status in Norwegian.First of all, it is rarely found in the traditional dialects but seems to be found firstand foremost in the Standard East Norwegian spoken in the larger Oslo area as wellas the vernaculars of other cities which can be described as close to the writtenBokmal standard of the language. This distribution is underscored by the fact thatthe word is completely absent from the Nynorsk standard of Norwegian insofaras this standard is conceived of as being based on the traditional rural dialects ofNorwegian. One could thus argue that hvilken in Norwegian is borrowed into thespoken language from the written language, thus ultimately from Danish, given that(written) Bokmal has evolved from (written) Danish. And in Danish there is (i)no masculine/feminine distinction, and (ii) the final neuter -t of both hvilken andthe definite suffix is pronounced (as /D/ in the dominant Copenhagen colloquialvariety).

Second, until recently there has existed a cognate for hvilken in East Norwegiandialects, namely vekken, and according to the description in Larsen (1907:116), thisitem was inflected like the definite suffix in the Oslo dialect, with a distinct feminineform vekka and a neuter form vekke without the final -t. This supports the view thatcontemporary hvilken is borrowed from the written language and still has propertiesthat partly relate to a different grammar or register – the word has not yet been fullyintegrated in the contemporary colloquial grammar.

Although this line of reasoning raises some important general questions, such aswhether a particular lexical item can at all ‘lie outside’ of the grammar proper as itwere, the bottom line is that we may, on formal, morphological grounds, argue thatMainland Scandinavian (h)vilken consists of a stem (hvilk-) plus the definite suffixwhich otherwise attaches to nouns across Scandinavian.

Given the well-established insight that the Scandinavian definite suffix entailsspecificity (Julien 2005, Anderssen 2005), and given that specificity quite clearly mustbe an integral component of the semantics of reference to TOKEN, we would thenhave a very direct way of accounting for the Mainland Scandinavian vs. ON/Icelandicsemantic difference: the definite suffix involved in (h)vilken is only compatible withqueries for TOKEN.

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Although this line of reasoning will not shed any light on why English whichis apparently TOKEN-querying, the idea seems worth following up for Scandinavian,and we will return to it below.

3.2 Icelandic hvaDa

The way to form queries for TOKEN in Icelandic is to use the expression hvaDa.Consider the illustration in (26).

(26) HvaDa bıll er þinn? Icelandicwhat.AFF car is yours

A: RauDi jeppinn þarna.red jeep.DEF there

B: #RauDur jeppi.red jeep

An interesting point of difference between the Mainland Scandinavian (h)vilkenand Icelandic hvaDa is that whereas the former is inflected (for gender and number)the latter does not show any inflection whatsoever. This lack of inflection on hvaDais illustrated by the following examples – notice the inflection on the adjective.

(27) a. HvaDa glæsileg-an bat keyptir þu? Icelandicwhat.AFF fancy-M.ACC boat bought you‘Which fancy boat did you buy?’

b. HvaDa glæsileg-t hus keyptir þu?what.AFF fancy-N.ACC house bought you‘Which fancy house did you buy?’

c. HvaDa glæsileg-a bok keyptir þu?what.AFF fancy-F.ACC book bought you‘Which fancy book did you buy?’

Given that Icelandic otherwise displays rich agreement on adnominal constituents,the lack of agreement on hvaDa is a somewhat peculiar fact. Still, the expressionappears to be morphologically complex, consisting of hvaD ‘what’ plus the formative-a. The origin and contemporary status of -a is uncertain; in section 6 I will suggestthat it is a head in the left periphery of the noun phrase to which hvaD moves and alignswith phonologically speaking, i.e. that -a is a kind of complementizer/preposition.

3.3 ‘Who’ as a determiner

One phenomenon which does not bear directly on the morphosyntactic considerationsof the previous two subsections, but which nevertheless deserves to be mentioned, is

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the fact that in some East Norwegian dialects the wh-item corresponding to Englishwho can be used adnominally.7 The example in (28a) has been retrieved from adiscussion forum on the Internet8 and the example in (28b) has been construed onthe basis of the a-example to illustrate the regular pronominal use of hvem.

(28) a. Hvem dag kommer skattepengene?who day comes tax-money.DEF

‘Which day will the tax money come?’b. Hvem kommer med skattepengene?

who comes with tax-money.DEF

‘Who will come with the tax money?’

Speakers who use hvem adnominally inform me that it entails queries for TOKEN on apar with hvilken and that for queries for KIND they would use a different expression,for example, assen (manner) ‘how’. This is, for instance, the system of the dialectspoken by younger people in the town of KragerP on the coast about 200 km southwestof Oslo (Gard F. Vangsnes, p.c.).

(29) a. A◦ssen/*hvem bil har du? Kragerø dialect (Norwegian)

howMNR who car have you‘What kind of car do you have?’

b. Hvem/*assen bil er din?who howMNR car is yours‘Which car is yours?’

Although perhaps somewhat exotic at first sight, finding such an extended use of‘who’ does make sense: in contrast to ‘what’, ‘who’ as a pronoun does indeedquery for specific individuals, hence TOKEN, and the dynamic relationship betweenpronouns and determiners are otherwise well-known in historical linguistics. In verygeneral terms, what we may say about the dialects in question is that their ‘who’ isendowed with some lexical feature that makes it amenable also for a DP-internal use,but that the semantic properties and entailments of the expression are otherwise notdifferent from what we see in other dialects.9

We also find examples of an extension going in the other direction amongScandinavian varieties, i.e. a wh-determiner which is also used as a wh-pronouncorresponding to ‘who’. The Ovdalian variety of Mainland Scandinavian, spoken inAlvdalen, Sweden, is a case in point. The wh-item ukin in this dialect, which quiteclearly is cognate with hvılık(u)r/(h)vilken10 is used both adnominally and for ‘who’:there is no other item corresponding to ‘who’.

(30) a. Ukin bil ir denn? Ovdalianwhich car is yours‘Which car is yours?’

240 Ø YS T E I N A L E X A N D E R VA N G S N E S

b. Ukin al du rak i Stokkol?which shall you meet in Stockholm‘Who will you meet in Stockholm?’

Again, the dynamic relationship between the wh-determiner and the wh personalpronoun functions makes perfect sense from a semantic/conceptual point of view.

The next step now is to consider another somewhat exotic property of manyScandinavian varieties, namely the adnominal use of what is otherwise a MANNER-querying wh-expression.

4. MANNER ‘HOW’ AS WH-MODIFIER AND WH-DETERMINER

The adnominal use of manner ‘how’ is quite widespread across Norwegian dialectsand non-standard varieties, even the one(s) spoken in Oslo (Vangsnes 2008b), and itis also a common trait of colloquial Icelandic (Vangsnes 2008a). Furthermore, the usecan also be encountered in Jutlandic dialects of Danish.11 Interestingly, in oppositeterms, it seems that Old Norse had a manner ‘how’ use of hvılıkr.12

As already mentioned the varieties differ as to whether adnominal manner ‘how’can yield both KIND and TOKEN queries. The KragerP examples in the previous sectionsuggest that in this dialect it can only query for KIND (see also Vangsnes 2008b:52f.)and that clearly seems to be the case also for Icelandic, as the following examplesindicate:

(31) a. Hvernig bıl attu?howMNR car owe-you‘What kind of car do you have?’

b. *Hvernig bıll er þinn?howMNR car is yours

c. Hvernig ætlarDu aD leysa vandamaliD?howMNR will-you to solve problem-DEF

‘How are you going to solve the problem?’

In the overview section above, however, we saw that in the TromsP dialect ofNorwegian the adnominal manner ‘how’ can be both a modifier and a determiner(i.e. ±KIND-querying). The same holds for my native Sogn dialect, illustrated hereby two examples from a corpus of recent video recordings.13

(32) a. Kelais bil køyre han? (Rannveig S40.5)howMNR car drives he‘What kind of car/#which car drives he?’

b. Kelais kjønn da e? (Rebekka S40.3)howMNR gender it is‘Which/#what kind of gender is it?

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English how how A where what

TromsP kor-sn kor A kor (hen) kaColloquial/dialectalEast Norwegian a-ssen a A a hen aSogn ke-lais ke A ke-st keBokmal/Danish hvor-dan hvor A hvor (hen) hva

Table 4. Manner ‘how’, degree ‘how’, ‘where’, and ‘what’ in English and four varieties of

Norwegian.

As should be evident just from the examples given so far there is considerablevariation in the form that manner ‘how’ takes across the varieties: korsn, assen,hvernig, kelais. These are just a few of a great multitude of forms (see the entry forkorleis in Norsk Ordbok, vol. 6), but importantly, as discussed in Vangsnes (2008a),most of the many forms can be related to just two abstract morphological templates,one which involves an incorprated direction noun (cf. English what way) and anotherwhich involves the formative -dan, arguably a borrowing of the past participle of ‘do’in Low German. The Bokmal Norwegian and Danish form hvordan is an example ofthe latter.

Another finding in Vangsnes (2008a) is that whenever manner ‘how’ can beused adnominally it can be argued to be (i) morphologically complex, (ii) distinctfrom degree ‘how’, and (iii) in a morphological relationship with other short wh-items, notably with ‘what’ and/or ‘where’.14 Swedish and Faroese are varietieswhere manner ‘how’ and degree ‘how’ are identical (with the forms hur and hvussu,respectively) as in English (how) and German (wie): neither Swedish nor Faroeseallows manner ‘how’ to be used adnominally. Most other forms seem to subsume thedegree wh-item which in turn is either identical to either ‘what’ or ‘where’ or at leastinvolved in the relevant expressions. Consider the comparison between English andfour Norwegian varieties in table 4.

Although Swedish does not allow hur manner/degree ‘how’ to be usedadnominally, there exists a particular wh-expression, hurdan, which in its compositionclearly is parallel to the Danish/Norwegian form hvordan and which can only be usedadnominally. Furthermore, although most speakers find this expression quite archaicand formal, they have a clear judgment that it is only compatible with queries forKIND. Hence, we have the examples in (33), where I have glossed hurdan accordingto the etymology and internal structure proposed in Vangsnes (2008a).

(33) a. Hurdan bil har du? Swedishhow-done car have you‘What kind of car do you have?’

b. *Hurdan bil ar din?how-done car is yours

The existence of the expression hurdan as a uniquely KIND-querying element pairedwith the observation that only a subset of the Norwegian varieties allow adnominal

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manner ‘how’ to query for TOKEN suggests that the primary adnominal use is theKIND-querying one. In turn, this means that we again have a case of extensionfrom wh-modification to wh-determination: in this case the historical development issuggested by contemporary microcomparative variation.

We will now turn to a third case which provides evidence for this cycle within wh-DPs, namely the expressions in Scandinavian which involve combination of ‘what’with other elements such as ‘for’, the indefinite article, or an overt KIND noun plusgenitive marking.

5. INTERROGATIVE DPs INVOLVING ‘WHAT’

As mentioned above, Nynorsk Norwegian bare, adnominal ‘what’ has a general±KIND capacity on a par with English what, and several Norwegian dialects seem toshare this capacity. The Sogn dialect of West Norwegian is a case in point – considerthe following examples from the corpus of video recordings referred to earlier.

(34) a. Ja, ke haorfarge ha han? (Rannveig R40.5)yes what hair-color has he‘What hair color does he have?’

b. Ke kjønn da e? (Silje S20.1)what gender it is‘Which/#what kind of gender is it?’

Alongside this and the adnominal use of manner ‘how’ it seems that most dialects ofScandinavian can resort to a strategy whereby ‘what’ combined with an overt ‘kind’noun is used. This noun is followed by the -s formative in Mainland Scandinavian,and the preposition for/for may optionally intervene between the invariant ‘what’and the KIND noun. In Danish one can also encounter an indefinite article betweenfor and the KIND noun: for cannot then be absent (cf. above). Hence, we have thefollowing:15

(35) a. hva (for) slags bil Bokmal Norwegianwhat for kind-s car

b. kva (for) slags bil Nynorsk Norwegianwhat for kind-s car

c. vad (for) slags bil Swedishwhat for kind-s car

d. vad (for) sorts bil Swedishwhat for sort-s car

e. hvad (for (en)) slags bil Danishwhat for kind-s car

f. *hvad en slags bil Danishwhat a kind-s car

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Search strings +‘for’ : −‘for’ (tokens) +‘for’ : −‘for’ (ratio)

Nynorsk (site:no) ‘kva (for) slags’ 52:795 1:15.3Bokmal (site:no) ‘hva (for) slags’ 128:837 1:6.5Danish (site:dk) ‘hvad (for (en)) slags’ 238:858 1:3.6Swedish (site:se) ‘vad (for) slags’ 861:471 1.8:1

‘vad (for) sorts’ 830:116 7.2:1

Table 5. Ratios of ±‘for’ in kind-querying determiners in Mainland Scandinavian (Google

search).

Search strings +‘for’ : −‘for’ (tokens)

Bokmal (site:no) ‘hva (for) slags type’ 3:808Nynorsk (site:no) ‘kva (for) slags type’ 0:108Danish (site:dk) ‘hvad (for) slags type’ 0:2Swedish (site:se) ‘vad (for) slags typ av’ 14:1

‘vad (for) sorts typ av’ 6:0

Table 6. Tokens of ±‘for’ in kind-querying determiners reinforced by ‘type’ (Google search).

Moreover, with respect to the presence/absence of for/for, there are statistical differ-ences between the Mainland Scandinavian standard varieties. Results from a Googlesearch suggest that absence of for is preferred in Norwegian, most strongly so in Nyn-orsk Norwegian. In Danish the distribution is more even, but still with a slight prefer-ence for the absence of for. For Swedish the situation is turned with higher numbersfor the presence of for, and this is strongest when the KIND noun is sort. The numbersand ratios from the Google search are given in table 5: for Danish I have summarizedthe numbers for . . . for slags . . . (32 hits) and . . . for {en, et} slags . . . (206 hits).

In Norwegian the KIND noun slags can be reinforced by another KIND noun suchas type ‘type’. Consider the following Nynorsk Norwegian example retrieved fromthe Internet:16

(36) Kva slags type ventilasjon er det i einebustaden?what kind-S type ventilation is it in single-living-unit-DEF

‘What kind of ventilation does the house have?’

Two quite interesting observations can be made in this respect on the basis of webstatistics. First of all, this kind of reinforcement in ‘what kind of’ DPs appears to bemore or less restricted to Norwegian. Second, in Norwegian this kind of reinforcementis only found if for is absent. Table 6 gives the figures for a Google search exploring theissue. The table shows that there are in fact some very few examples of reinforcementin Swedish, (almost) all appearing with for, but crucially with the preposition av ‘of’after the reinforcer.

244 Ø YS T E I N A L E X A N D E R VA N G S N E S

Leaving KIND-reinforcement in Swedish aside as a quirk for future investigations,we can now summarize the findings above as follows:

(37) (i) Among the Mainland Scandinavian varieties absence of for/forfrom the ‘what kind of’ determiner is preferred in Norwegian.

(ii) KIND-reinforcement is (more or less) restricted to Norwegian.(iii) KIND-reinforcement requires absence of for/for.

At this point it is of great importance to observe that for Norwegian it seems that,at least for some speakers, the KIND denotation of slags has become bleeched andthat the expression in fact can be used to query for TOKEN. Corroborative evidencefor this can be easily retrieved from the Internet. Consider the dialogue in (38)17

and the example in (39)18 for Nynorsk Norwegian, and (40)19 and (41)20 for BokmalNorwegian.

(38) A: Kva slags bok eller film vil du anbefala til andre?what kind-of book or film will you recommend to others‘What book or film would you recommend to others?’

B: Bøkene om Kurt Wallander av Henning Mankell.books-DEF about Kurt Wallander by Henning Mankell‘The books about Kurt Wallander by Henning Mankell.’

(39) Kva slags dag er det du sel dei?what kind-of day is it you sell them‘What day is it that you sell them?’

(40) Pa den maten behøver dere ikke passe paon that way-DEF need you.PL not look onhva slags dag og uke renovasjonsbilen kjører . . .what kind-of day and week renovation-car-DEF drives‘That way you don’t need to pay attention to which day and week therenovation car is out driving’

(41) Hva slags kjendis ville du dratt pa ferie med?what kind-of celebrity would you gone on holiday with‘Which celebrity would you like to go on a vacation with?’

I have so far not been able to find comparable TOKEN-querying cases of such wh-DPswith an overt KIND noun in Danish and Swedish. That supports the language-internalfindings for Norwegian: from a purely technical point of view it is tempting to suggestthat the absence of for may have paved the way for extending the use of the ‘whatkind of’ expression from wh-modification to wh-determination. In turn, now havingan expression which is ±KINDq opens up for reinforcement of the modifier functionby the addition of another KIND noun.

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This is, then, our third case which suggests that there is a cycle involved in thedomain wh-modification/wh-determination. This time the cycle manifests itself whenwe compare numerical data from the contemporary written Mainland Scandinavianvarieties.21

Let us then summarize and consider the findings in the preceding sections inrelation to the rough phrase structural sketch given in the introduction.

6. ANALYSIS AND CONCLUSION

This overview of interrogative noun phrases in Scandinavian has discussed essentiallythree different types of adnominal wh-expressions: cognates of English which, manner‘how’ used adnominally, and expressions involving ‘what’ plus an overt KIND noun.

For all of these three domains we have seen that varieties differ with respectto whether the expressions query for KIND or TOKEN or for both: Old Norse hvılıkrqueries for KIND whereas contermporary Mainland Scandinavian (h)vilken queriesfor TOKEN; Icelandic hvernig (manner ‘how’) only queries for KIND, whereas korsn inthe TromsP dialect and other North Norwegian dialects can query for both KIND andTOKEN; for many speakers of Norwegian hva slags can query for both KIND and TOKEN

whereas the corresponding expression presumably queries for KIND only in Swedishand Danish. We have also seen that Icelandic hvaDa only queries for TOKEN, and thatthe same holds for the adnominal use of hvem ‘who’ in East Norwegian dialects, andfurthermore that bare adnominal ‘what’ is ±KIND in Scandinavian just as in English.

One indisputable conclusion can be drawn from this: we are dealing with a highlyflexible part of grammar, at least from a historical and dialectological point of view.The question then arises whether this flexibility is unpredictable and unconstrained.I have suggested that it may not be, and that we can observe a general tendencywhereby wh-modifiers develop into wh-determiners.

There are reasons to believe that this general development path is not confinedto Scandinavian/Germanic: it seems to have a parallel in Romance at least in thatLatin qualis queried for KIND whereas its descendants in Italian and Spanish, qualeand cual, now only query for TOKEN. Consider the examples in (42).

(42) a. Qualis dux Hannibal est? LatinQUAL leader Hannibal is‘What kind of leader is Hannibal?’

b. Quale giorno dovremmo incontrarci? ItalianQUAL day should-we meet.CL

‘Which day should we meetc. Cual dıa de la semana es tu favorito? Spanish

QUAL day of the week is your favorite‘Which day of the week is your favorite one?’

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A host of interesting issues concerning morphosyntactic details can be detected onthe basis of the presentation above. In the remainder of this paper I will, however,concentrate on discussing how the putative modification–to–determination cycle canbe captured in quite general terms, and leave the more detailed questions to futurework.

Following Leu (2008a, b) I will argue that adnominal wh-expressions canoriginate in the adjectival domain of the noun phrase. This seems quite justifiable forcases like hvılıkr which inflects precisely like a strong adjective, see above. Leu alsogives arguments from Swiss German to show that adjectival morphology can appeareven on the preposition in the was fur-construction (Leu 2008a:7).

(43) Was fur-ig-a wi hesch kauft? Swiss Germanwhat for-ADJ-MASC wine have-you bought‘What kind of wine did you buy?’

Very similar data of the Swiss German type can be found in the North Ostrobothniandialects (of Swedish) in Finland. Consider the following data, which were collectedduring the NORMS fieldwork in the area in June 2006.22 The first set of examples isfrom Esse.

(44) a. va-for-a bil (45) a. ein stor-a bil Essewhat-for-AFF car a big-AFF car (Finland-Swedish)

b. va-for-in bok b. ein tjock-in bokwhat-for-AFF book a thick-AFF book

c. va-for-i hus c. eit stor-e huswhat-for-AFF house a big-AFF house

In the dialect of Nedervetil (which lacks gender marking altogether) the sameadjectival formative can appear both on the ‘for’ preposition and on an overt KIND

noun.

(46) a. ein stor-an kar Nedervetil (Finland-Swedish)a big-AFF guy

b. va-fyr-an karwhat-for-AFF guy

c. va-soss-an bilwhat-sort’s-AFF car

An interesting fact about the apparent affix we see in these cases is that it probably isnot an affix at all, but rather a postadjectival enclitic element. The reason for arguingthis is that when two adjectives are conjoined, the element will only appear once,and then on the last adjective; thus, we have (47a), but not (47b). However, if theadjectives are adjacent, without an intervening conjunction, the element will appearon both, as in (47c).

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(47) a. ein [stor o fin]-an bil Kokkola (Finland-Swedish)a big and nice-AFF car

b. *ein stor-an o fin-an bilc. ein stor-an, fin-an bil

This means that the element shows very similar properties to the so-calledpostadjectival indefinite article discussed in Delsing (1993:142ff., 2003:45ff.), andwhat I will tentatively take this to mean is that also adnominal wh-expressionsthat involve the indefinite article start out in the adjectival domain of the nounphrase.

In turn I will argue that the KIND reading is established by the expressionmoving into the classifier domain of the noun phrase, i.e. into CardP, whereasthe TOKEN reading is established if it moves into the DP domain. From thesepositions the wh-expression will in turn move leftwards to KP in order to license wh-features.

The rough sketch from the introduction can then be augmented as follows, whereαP is the adjectival domain of the noun phrase (see Julien 2005).

(48) a. [KP whi [DP [CardP ti [αP ti [NP (wh-modification)b. [KP whi [DP ti [CardP [αP ti [NP (wh-determination)

The very general idea I offer to account for the apparent drift from modification todetermination is then quite simple. A modifier will pass the D◦ head when movingfurther to KP, and over time it may then also be associated with this part of thefunctional domain and develop into a licensor for TOKEN queries, say through achange in the feature composition of the expression.

In more concrete terms my proposal is then that Old Norse hvılıkr would undergoa derivation like the one in (49a). At some historical stage hvılıkr (or some cognatevariant) would optionally be able to undergo the derivation in (49b) and serve tolicense a TOKEN query. This is the status I will attribute to korsn in the TromsP dialectand other North Norwegian varieties, i.e. adnominal ‘how’, which in these varietiescan be used to query for either KIND or for TOKEN.

(49) a. [KP hvılıkri [DP [CardPti [αP ti [NP Stage Ib. [KP ‘hvılıkri’ [DP ti [CardP [αP ti [NP Stage IIc. [KP (h)vilkeni [DP ti [CardP [αP [NP Stage III

Then, as hvılıkr developed into contemporary (h)vilken, the expression would nolonger be first merged in the adjectival domain, but rather directly into the DPdomain. At this point the expression has developed into a true determiner with nocapacity to license a KIND reading anymore.

248 Ø YS T E I N A L E X A N D E R VA N G S N E S

For Mainland Scandinavian the last stage coincides with a change inmorphological properties: as argued above, the inflection of contemporary (h)vilkenis the definite suffix otherwise found on nouns. Perhaps this change in morphologywas downright triggered by the grammaticalization drift.

This means that we can attribute the same status to the pure determiners hvaDa(Icelandic) and hvem (East Norwegian dialects) as to (h)vilken: they are all mergeddirectly in DP, except that I will argue that -a is merged in K◦ and that it isphonologically merged with (uninflected) hvaD after the latter has moved to KP.Nothing crucial bears on this treatment of hvaDa, except that it possibly leaves someroom for understanding why it shows no gender, case, and number inflection. As forthe other expressions discussed above, both the adnominal ‘how’ and the expressionsinvolving an overt KIND noun I will assume that they are all merged in the adjectivaldomain of the noun phrase. They all have the capacity to license a KIND query bymovement into CardP and some of them have also acquired a capacity to license aTOKEN query by moving into DP.

According to this very general proposal we should not expect cases of‘downward’ grammaticalization, i.e. that a pure wh-determiner should develop into awh-modifier, the reason simply being that a pure wh-determiner will not move ‘over’CardP. Whether there exist no such cases of determiner-to-modifier development isof course an empirical matter.

Many unsolved puzzles remain. More detailed investigations of themorphological and compositional structure of the various wh-expressions needs to becarried out and brought to bear on the general proposal presented here. The conceptualbasis for using manner ‘how’ adnominally also seems to be an interesting issue topursue.

There are currently several detailed and fine-grained analyses of the structureof Germanic adnominal wh-expressions available on the market: see, for instance,Bennis, Corver & den Dikken (1998) and Haegeman (to appear), which pursuea predicate inversion analysis of determiners, and van Riemsdijk (2005) and Leu(2008a, b), which analyze the structure of complex determiners by invoking thenotion of silent nouns. Although it is not immediately clear whether the core of thecurrent proposal can be withheld when confronted with these analyses, i.e. as far asaccounting for the putative general drift from modifier to determiner is concerned,I believe that the data presented here can be a valuable contribution to the furtherdevelopment of such analyses, and I consider that the next step.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

For comments and discussion on previous versions of this paper I would like to thankLiliane Haegeman, Terje Lohndal, and an anonymous reviewer. I am furthermoregrateful to Tom Leu for continuous and continued discussion of the internal structure

I N T E R R O G AT I V E N O U N P H R A S E S A C R O S S N O R T H G E R M A N I C 249

of interrogative noun phrases in particular and DP syntax in general. The paper hasin part evolved from a number of presentations given since winter 2006, and thusbenefitted from feedback from and discussions with a large number of people.

NOTES

1. See http://menota.org/.2. The entry is given here as retrieved from http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1O27-

which.html3. The noun is in turn obviously the origin of the adjective (a)like, and corresponding

etymologies involving this element can be given for such (‘that + like’) and each (‘ever +like’).

4. Despite the claims retrieved from several dictionaries concerning the KIND-queryingproperty of hvılıkr and its cognates in other Old Germanic languages, it is not entirelyclear whether it could not also be TOKEN-querying (i.e. ±KIND). As pointed out by areviewer, it is possible to interpret the example from Heggstad et al. (1975) in (18) asTOKEN-querying, i.e. with a ‘which reading’. Moreover, a search in the MENOTA corpusretrieved several additional examples which seem to have a TOKEN reading. (Thanks toGunnar Hrafn Hrafnbjargarson for discussion on this matter.) Some further philologicalresearch seems in order to better establish when the possible TOKEN-querying capacityarose in the history of Scandinavian and/or whether the received knowledge reflected bythe Old Norse dictionaries needs to be revised.

5. The ‘open’ class adjectives is a small class of adjectives which inflect like past participles.It is included here for the sake of completeness.

6. The search was confined to the national domains .se, .dk, .no. Each indivitual item in thesearch result was not controlled for irrelevance or circumstantial errors, nor for whether thetexts in hand may have been produced by non-native speakers. The figures represent thenumber of web pages given at the end of the search list, i.e. with Google itself eliminatingduplicated and similar web pages.

7. The adnominal use of ‘who’ is noted in several sources on East Norwegian dialects fromthe beginning of the 20th century, one being Larsen (1907) on the Oslo (Kristiania) dialect.Thanks to Svein Lie (p.c.) for bringing this to my attention.

8. http://www.tettinntil.no/forumet/showthread.php?t=287989. As shown in Vangsnes (2008b:53) the determiner use of hvem appears to be quite

stigmatized and frowned upon: on the Internet one can easily find negative and condemningstatements about the usage.

10. See Rietz (1962:260). Various Swedish dialects have a form hukkin (and similar) andOvdalian exhibits a general loss of initial /h/.

11. Jysk Ordbog provides the following examples from Jutlandic dialects (orthographyslightly modified here):

(i) a. hwant i tjow·l wa bruj’en i? Vendsysselhow a dress was bride-DEF in‘What kind of dress was the bride wearing?’

b. hwant wej’er mon wi fo’r i ma·rhow weather think we get in morning‘What kind of weather will we get tomorrow?’

250 Ø YS T E I N A L E X A N D E R VA N G S N E S

During the NORMS fieldwork in Western Jutland in January 2008 I intervieweddialect speakers who accepted the use of the expression (hurn in their variety) for KIND

queries, but there was no informant who accepted it for TOKEN queries.12. In J. Fritzners ordbok, for instance, the following example is listed in the entry for

hvılıkr:

(i) Hvılıkt hefir þu? Old Norsewhich have you‘How do you do?’

13. The corpus consists of conversations between pairs of consultants from the municipalitiesSogndal and Gaupne, video-recorded by myself in 2003 and 2005 within the frame of aproject investigating lack of V2 in wh-questions. The consultants were partly given tasksthat served to elicit wh-questions. The original project, and thus the data collection, wasfinanced by grant no. 148440/530 from the Research Council of Norway.

14. As pointed out by a reviewer, there are certain quirks with the Rogaland and TrPndelagdialects. These quirks are addressed in Vangsnes (2008a).

15. As also mentioned in the introductory overview, in Icelandic the KIND noun carries genitivecase and the preceding wh-element carries neuter, singular, genitive morphology. Nopreposition may intervene between the wh-element and the KIND noun in Icelandic.

16. http://www.ssb.no/skjema/0299/0299-n.pdf17. http://www.dalane-tidende.no/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=3059&

Itemid=6218. http://www.haugeskule.gs.sf.no/avis/torskehamburger.shtml19. http://www.bardu.kommune.no/renovasjon.18190.no.html20. http://rogerskog2.diskusjonsforum.no/rogerskog2-post-1556.html21. There may be an underlying dialectal basis for the numbers that we find: it is quite

conceivable that it is the situation across Norwegian dialects that comes to the surfacein the written language in this case. On the one hand, it might be that we find the samebleeching of the KIND noun in a subset of Norwegian dialects, and, on the other hand, itcould be that the widespread adnominal use of manner ‘how’ with ±KINDq entailments(as in the TromsP and Sogn dialects) surfaces in the written language with this propertytransposed to a ‘what kind of’ expression. For Norwegian, there is, I believe, a certainnormative pressure to not use adnominal manner ‘how’ in writing, but the ‘what kind of’expression of course per se is not subject to such a pressure. So if, for some speakers,the ‘what kind of’ expression lexicalizes, as it were, the adnominal manner ‘how’ of theirdialect, that could partly explain why we also find instances of token-querying ‘what kindof’ expression.

22. See http://uit.no/scandiasyn/osterbotten/ for a blog-style field report.

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Delsing, Lars-Olof. 1993. The Internal Structure of Noun Phrases in the ScandinavianLanguages: A Comparative Study. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Lund.

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Delsing, Lars-Olof. 2003. Syntaktisk variation i nordiska nominalfraser. In ØysteinAlexander Vangsnes, Anders Holmberg & Lars-Olof Delsing (eds.), Dialektsyntaktiskastudier av den nordiska nominalfrasen, 11–64. Oslo: Novus Press.

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