Forthcoming: Acquisition, variation & attrition

Merette Brendeford Anderssen (ed), Kristine Bentzen (ed), Anne Dahl (ed), Terje Lohndal (ed), Natalia Mitrofanova (ed), Yulia Rodina (ed)

Synopsis

Humans are seemingly unique in the animal kingdom in that we have language; systems enabling communication about any topic, be it past, present or future. In fact, humans are not limited to one language but can acquire several under the right conditions. Although undoubtedly a cultural object, language is also a fundamental part of the mind/brain of a human being, the constitution of which we refer to as a mental grammar. Changes in states of linguistic knowledge, whether in development (acquisition), over the lifespan or across generations (change) examined across diverse populations and language combinations (variation), provide crucial insights about the organization of mental grammars. This volume, entitled Variation, Acquisition and Change, brings together research on language acquisition in different populations, language change in various languages, and linguistic variation from an empirical and a theoretical perspective. The chapters illuminate these issues from a range of different methodological, empirical, and theoretical perspectives. Importantly, many chapters also combine two or three of the themes, illustrating that they are linked and that such combinations increase our understanding of a given linguistic phenomenon.

Chapters

  • Introduction
    Merette Brendeford Anderssen, Kristine Bentzen, Anne Dahl, Terje Lohndal, Natalia Mitrofanova, Yulia Rodina
  • An exoskeletal grammar approach to linguistic flexibility
    Tor Anders Åfarli
  • English verb placement in Norwegian/English bilinguals
    A micro-cue approach
    Merette Brendeford Anderssen, Kristine Bentzen
  • Mian verbs trouble linguists not learners
    Greville Corbett, Sebastian Fedden
  • A corpus study of verb placement in L3 French and L3 German
    Insights from learner language
    Anne Dahl, Kjersti Faldet Listhaug, Guro Busterud
  • Directionality of cross-linguistic influence
    Better insights from more comparisons
    Judith Schlenter, Chloe Castle
  • Dynamics of case in monolingual and bilingual first language acquisition of Russian
    Natalia Gagarina, Artemis Alexiadou
  • Movement, morphology and Middle English multilingualism
    A perfect storm of grammatical events
    Kristin Melum Eide
  • Eliciting grammatical gender
    Some methodological reflections
    Ragnhild Eik, Terje Lohndal, Yvonne van Baal, Hedda Solbakken
  • Naming what has not been done
    Antonio Fábregas, Raquel González Rodríguez
  • Using production data to study pragmatic development
    Ingrid Lossius Falkum, Line Sjøtun Helganger
  • Cross-linguistic influence in L3 Norwegian
    An empirical study of Ukrainian-English speakers in Norway
    Nadine Kolb, David Natvig, Brechje van Osch
  • Bilectalism, dominance, and micro-cues
    Vowel insertion and deletion in Brazilian and European Portuguese bilectals
    Martin Krämer, Tanja Kupisch, Tammer Castro
  • Unshifted subjects or shifting particles?
    On the acquisition of particle and subject placement
    Björn Lundquist, Tina Louise Ringstad
  • Crosslinguistic influence and the role of micro-cues in gender assignment
    Ukrainian refugee children acquiring Polish
    Oleksandra Hrebenshchykova, Kamil Długosz, Natalia Mitrofanova
  • Processing of locative prepositional phrases by young children
    An eye-tracking study
    Natalia Mitrofanova, Serge Minor, Irina Sekerina
  • Subordination in Swedish narratives of monolingual and bilingual children
    Ute Bohnacker
  • Is a center a unit or a group of individuals?
    Agreement of Norwegian predicate adjectives
    Tore Nesset, Laura Alexis Janda
  • Plural generic statements in Norwegian as L3
    Marta Velnić, Roumyana Slabakova, Anne Dahl
  • Micro-cues are spans
    Michael Putnam, Deborah Adeyeye, Nicholas Wensel, Emmeline Wilson
  • Maintaining word order flexibility in contact with a V2 grammar
    Evidence from semi-spontaneous narratives of Norwegian-Russian bilingual children
    Yulia Rodina
  • Exploring the micro-cue model
    Contextual and referential effects on sentence comprehension in Russian-German bilingual children
    Antje Sauermann, Natalia Gagarina
  • The effectiveness of cues in gender processing by Russian-speaking children
    Irina Sekerina
  • Categorization of novel nouns with ambiguous gender cues
    Experimental evidence from Russian
    Olga Urek
  • The nanosyntax of Norwegian som
    Øystein Alexander Vangsnes
  • Multilingualism and syntactic change in English 1400-1700
    Ans van Kemenade
  • Approaches to L3 phonological acquisition research
    Challenges, considerations, best practices
    Magdalena Wrembel

Biographies

Merette Brendeford Anderssen

Merete Anderssen is Professor of English linguistics at UiT The Arctic University of Norway. She is also the leader of the Learning Domain at the Center for Language, Brain & Learning (C-LaBL) at the same university. Her research interests include first, second, and third language acquisition, crosslinguistic influence, and word order phenomena in different contexts and populations.

Kristine Bentzen

Kristine Bentzen is Professor of Nordic linguistics at UiT The Arctic University of Norway and a member of the Center for Language, Brain & Learning (C-LaBL). Her research interests include first language acquisition, bilingualism, theoretical syntax, language revitalization (of Kven and Sámi languages) and aphasia. She is also an Adjunct Professor at the Sámi University of Applied Sciences (Kautokeino, Norway).

Anne Dahl

Anne Dahl is Professor of English linguistics at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. She is also an Adjunct Professor at UiT The Arctic University of Norway and a member of the Center for Language, Brain & Learning (C-LaBL). Her research interests include second and third language acquisition, cross-linguistic influence, and multilingual mental grammars.

Terje Lohndal

Terje Lohndal is Professor of English linguistics at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology and Dean of the Faculty of Humanities. He is also an Adjunct Professor at UiT The Arctic University of Norway and a member of the Center for Language, Brain & Learning (C-LaBL). His research interests include comparative grammar, multilingualism, word order and grammatical gender.

Natalia Mitrofanova

Natalia Mitrofanova is professor of English linguistics at UiT The Arctic University of Norway. She is also the leader of the Language Domain at the Center for Language, Brain & Learning (C-LaBL) at UiT. Her research interests include crosslinguistic influence in multilingual language acquisition and attrition, grammatical processing, and experimental psycholinguistics.

Yulia Rodina

Yulia Rodina is professor of Linguistics and Language Acquisition at UiT The Arctic University of Norway and a member of the Center for Language, Brain & Learning (C-LaBL). Her research adopts a psycholinguistic perspective on language acquisition and processing, with special emphasis on heritage language bilingualism and multilingualism across the lifespan.

bookcover

Published

February 27, 2026
LaTeX source on GitHub

Series

Open Germanic Linguistics

Online ISSN

2750-557X

Print ISSN

2750-5588
Cite as
Anderssen, Merette Brendeford, Bentzen, Kristine, Dahl, Anne, Lohndal, Terje, Mitrofanova, Natalia & Rodina, Yulia (eds.). Forthcoming. Acquisition, variation & attrition. (Open Germanic Linguistics). Berlin: Language Science Press.
Copyright (c) 2026 Merette Brendeford Anderssen, Kristine Bentzen, Anne Dahl, Terje Lohndal, Natalia Mitrofanova; Tor Anders Åfarli; Yulia Rodina; Greville Corbett, Sebastian Fedden, Kjersti Faldet Listhaug, Guro Busterud, Judith Schlenter, Chloe Castle, Natalia Gagarina, Artemis Alexiadou, Kristin Melum Eide, Ragnhild Eik, Yvonne van Baal, Antonio Fábregas, Raquel González Rodríguez, Ingrid Lossius Falkum, Line Sjøtun Helganger, Nadine Kolb, David Natvig, Brechje van Osch, Martin Krämer, Tanja Kupisch, Tammer Castro, Björn Lundquist, Tina Louise Ringstad, Oleksandra Hrebenshchykova, Kamil Długosz, Natalia Mitrofanova, Serge Minor, Irina Sekerina, Ute Bohnacker, Tore Nesset, Laura Alexis Janda, Marta Velnić, Roumyana Slabakova, Michael Putnam, Deborah Adeyeye, Nicholas Wensel, Emmeline Wilson, Antje Sauermann, Irina Sekerina, Olga Urek, Øystein Alexander Vangsnes, Ans van Kemenade, Magdalena Wrembel, Hedda Solbakken

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