Forthcoming: Syntactic Frames in Scandinavian and beyond

Brita Ramsevik Riksem (ed), Ragnhild Eik (ed)

Synopsis

Over the past decades, significant progress has been made in late-insertion, exoskeletal and neo-constructionist models of grammar — approaches that can be broadly subsumed under the notion of Syntactic Frames. This volume brings together a range of contributions that in various ways explore the theoretical potential of syntactic frames: how they shed light on fundamental theoretical questions, identify linguistic patterns, and offer a tool for analyzing various linguistic phenomena.

Several chapters focus on how syntactic frames can be utilized in analyzing specific structural patterns, while others extend the discussion to historical change, crosslinguistic comparison, experimental data, and dialectal variation. The volume also includes chapters considering how syntactic frames may inform adjacent domains such as grammar didactics.

While the empirical focus of the volume lies on Scandinavian languages — Norwegian in particular — many contributions engage with languages beyond this context, offering broader comparative insights.

By assembling research that investigate established grammatical concepts through the lens of syntactic frames, while also extending this approach to related empirical domains, this volume demonstrates the versatility of the framework as a way of understanding language.

Chapters

  • The constructionist landscape in recent linguistic thinking
    Heidi Brøseth
  • Do modal verbs have argument structure?
    On modals and the AUX-V split
    Kristin Melum Eide
  • The fate of Old Norse genitive objects
    Ivar Berg, Þórhallur Eyþórsson
  • Frames and register
    The omission of D and T in English headlines
    Andrew Weir
  • Syntactic Frames, linguistic creativity and grammar teaching
    Mari Nygård
  • The philosophy of grammar education
    Revisiting Otto Jespersen’s rank system and nexus theory 100 years later
    Leiv Inge Aa
  • With predication in mind
    Kristin Klubbo Brodahl, Inghild Flaate Høyem
  • Analytic and synthetic passives in Norwegian
    A structural approach
    Artemis Alexiadou, Terje Lohndal
  • The need for restructuring with Norwegian 'need'
    Helge Lødrup
  • Getting transferred
    Progressives & passives in Pennsylvania Dutch
    Michael Travis Putnam, Andrew Douglas Hoffman
  • Spatial anchorage and “double” definiteness in Meiteilon
    Tanmoy Bhattacharya
  • Valued gender at different positions within the Spanish DP
    Antonio Fábregas
  • Plural suffixes in the context of a gender change
    A study of four Norwegian dialects
    Terje Lohndal, Hedda Solbakken, Yvonne van Baal, Ragnhild Eik
  • Puzzles in pronominal structure from Nord-Jæren
    Pritty Patel-Grosz, Patrick Georg Grosz, Erlend Øyvindssønn Ravnanger
  • The Object Shift Conundrum
    What can reaction time tell us?
    Merete Anderssen, Marta Velnic
  • Wh-questions in Sogn Norwegian when prosodic factors influence syntactic variation
    Øystein Alexander Vangsnes, Maud Westendorp

Biographies

Brita Ramsevik Riksem

Brita Ramsevik Riksem is an associate professor of Norwegian language education in the Department of Teacher Education at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. Her research interests include grammar and grammar didactics, linguistic variation and change, language mixing, and language planning. She primarily works with Norwegian as both a first and second language, as well as the heritage language North American Norwegian.

Ragnhild Eik

Ragnhild Eik is an associate professor of Nordic linguistics in the Department of Language and Literature at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. Her work focuses on Norwegian grammar, including among other things the grammar of Norwegian compounds and the variation, acquisition and change in the grammatical gender of Norwegian nouns. Moreover, her research interests include dialectal variation, multilingualism and code-switching, as well as grammar teaching.

Cover image

Published

September 2, 2025
LaTeX source on GitHub

Series

Open Germanic Linguistics

Online ISSN

2750-557X

Print ISSN

2750-5588
Cite as
Riksem, Brita Ramsevik & Eik, Ragnhild (eds.). Forthcoming. Syntactic Frames in Scandinavian and beyond. (Open Germanic Linguistics). Berlin: Language Science Press.
Copyright (c) 2025 Brita Ramsevik Riksem, Ragnhild Eik; Heidi Brøseth, Kristin Melum Eide, Ivar Berg, Þórhallur Eyþórsson, Andrew Weir, Mari Nygård, Leiv Inge Aa, Kristin Klubbo Brodahl, Inghild Flaate Høyem, Artemis Alexiadou, Terje Lohndal, Helge Lødrup, Michael Travis Putnam, Andrew Douglas Hoffman, Tanmoy Bhattacharya, Antonio Fábregas, Hedda Solbakken, Yvonne van Baal, Ragnhild Eik, Erlend Øyvindssønn Ravnanger, Pritty Patel-Grosz, Patrick Georg Grosz, Merete Anderssen, Marta Velnic, Øystein Alexander Vangsnes, Maud Westendorp

License

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.