Speaker: Caroline Heycock, University of Edinburgh
Title: Riding the tail of the S-shaped curve: detecting the end of a syntactic
change in Faroese.
Date: Friday, November 12, 2010
Time: 3:30-5:00PM
Place: 32-155 (PLEASE NOTE ROOM)
Since the seminal work of Jonas 1996, the Scandinavian language Faroese has been considered to be a crucial test case for claims concerning the relation or lack of it between agreement morphology and verb movement. In this language, syncretism has expanded in the agreement system, and Jonas argued that there are now two dialects, one in which verb movement over negation has been lost entirely, and one in which verb movement is optional, although preferred. In this talk I will present new data from a 3-year project on the status of verb movement in current Faroese. I will argue that there is no evidence for dialectal variation; more surprisingly, there is also no evidence of generational difference. I will claim that it is nevertheless possible to detect in Faroese the prints of a syntactic change that is not yet quite complete: a change at the very tail of the S-shaped curve.