Anders Holmberg
Biographic Data
| ID | 3601854 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Anders Holmberg |
| GIVEN NAMES | Anders |
| FAMILY NAME | Holmberg |
| SIGNATURE | HOLMBERG A |
| AFFILIATIONS | Newcastle University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-5499-3760 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 36 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 220 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 35 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1979 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
Expressing my feelings, not yours
Three issues are taken up: (a) Why do some people never use self-talk? (b) Self-talk is not describing but expressing one's feelings, a distinct type of speech act, which is part of the explanation why use of “you” is restricted in self-talk. (c) The use of “we” in self-talk
Topic Particles, Agreement, and Movement in an Arabic Dialect
The dialect of North Hail, a variety of Najdi Arabic, has a set of sentence-initial particles marking topics of various kinds that correspond to those argued by Frascarelli and Hinterhölzl (2007) to be characteristic of Italian and German: Shift-Topic, Contrastive Topic, and Familiar Topic. In their work, as in much other work in the cartographic tradition, a hierarchy of abstract topic heads is postulated in the C-domain, which host the topical …
Eesti keele otseste eriküsilausete sõnajärje aspekte
Estonian is a verb-second (V2) language: in certain types of sentences, the finite verb tends to be the second constituent. The V2 feature of Estonian is most likely to have developed under Germanic influence. However, there are differences between Germanic and Estonian V2 order. The word order of Estonian main-clause wh-interrogatives is one of the major exceptions to the V2 order. Main-clause wh-interrogatives are always V2 in Germanic but pred…
The structure of Chinese personal names
Reduplication and the structure of nouns in Xining Chinese
In Xining Chinese, especially as used by older people, free nouns are always reduplicated, as a purely formal condition without any semantic effects. We argue that the reduplication takes place when an acategorial root is merged with a null nominal categorizer which copies the phonological matrix of the root, as an effect of a condition ruling out free monosyllabic nouns. When the condition is not independently satisfied, as in a compound or deri…
Object symmetry effects in Germanic
This paper focuses on passive symmetry effects in Germanic. We describe two large-sample judgment experiments with native speakers of Norwegian and Swedish, two partially symmetric passive languages. The results fail to support predictions of Anagnostopoulou's (2003) seminal locality approach to passive symmetry in these languages. We propose that constraints on object ordering in these varieties are better modeled on a revised version of classic…
Movement from the Double Object Construction Is Not Fully Symmetrical
A movement asymmetry arises in some languages that are otherwise symmetrical for both A- and Ā-movement in the double object construction, including Norwegian, North-West British English, and a range of Bantu languages including Zulu and Lubukusu: a Theme object can be Ā-moved out of a Recipient (Goal) passive, but not vice versa. Our explanation of this asymmetry is based on phase theory- more specifically, a stricter version of the Phase Impene…
Stylistic Fronting
Stylistic Fronting (SF) is a phenomenon where a syntactic constituent is moved to what looks like the subject position in finite sentences with a subject gap, that is, subject relatives, embedded subject questions, other embedded sentences with the subject extracted, and various types of impersonal sentences. The phenomenon has mainly been studied in the context of Icelandic, Faroese, and Old Scandinavian, but is now known also to occur in Old Ro…
Truly Minimal Pronouns
Tis paper examines the properties of inclusive generic constructions, focusing on languages where the inclusive generic pronoun is a null category. We investigate empirical data from a set of languages with and without agreement to test Phimsawat's (2011) hypothesis that the inclusive generic pronoun lacks all phi-features, and therefore has the least restricted reading, due to there being no restriction on the reference. We show that this hypoth…
Norse against Old English
The conclusion seems inescapable, if the facts in Emonds & Faarlund are more or less right: Middle English would be the outcome of a shift from West Germanic grammar to an eccentric form of North Germanic grammar
Case and Other Functional Categories in Finnish Syntax
Verb Second
The Syntax of the Finnish Question Particle
Finnish forms yes-no questions by adjoining the enclitic particle -ko to the first constituent in the sentence. If the question narrowly focuses on some constituent in the sentence, that constituent is fronted, and the clitic is attached to it. A common assumption in such cases is that the clitic is a C element and the focus moves to its left. However, a more careful investigation of the distribution of focus, and a comparison with the focus part…
A Syntactic Universal and Its Consequences
This article investigates the Final-over-Final Constraint (FOFC): a head-initial category cannot be the immediate structural complement of a head-final category within the same extended projection. This universal cannot be formulated without reference to the kind of hierarchical structure generated by standard models of phrase structure. First, we document the empirical evidence: logically possible but crosslinguistically unattested combinations …
Interrogative slifting in English
The syntax of answers to polar questions in English and Swedish
The syntax-morphology relation
Parameters in minimalist theory
The P&P theory of UG has come under heavy criticism, lately, from outside but also from inside generative grammar. The claim is that the search for ‘deep parameters’ underlying clusters of properties across languages has led nowhere, and should be given up. I have revisited a theory, now two decades old, which explained ten syntactic differences between Insular and Mainland Scandinavian as the effects of a single parametric difference (in a serie…
Replies to comments
‘Free’ inversion in Romance and the Null Subject Parameter
A summary is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content.
Parametric Variation
Parametric variation in linguistic theory refers to the systematic grammatical variation permitted by the human language faculty. Although still widely assumed, the parametric theory of variation has in recent years been subject to re-evaluation and critique. The Null Subject Parameter, which determines among other things whether or not a language allows the suppression of subject pronouns, is one of the best-known and most widely discussed examp…
V-movement in affirmative replies and copy deletion
Icelandic Dative Intervention
The Scandinavian Languages
Linearization in two ways
What the theories of Fox & Pesetsky (F&P) and Erteschik-Shir (ES) have in common is that they both account for Holmberg’s Generalization (HG) in terms of linearization. That is virtually the only thing they have in common, though, and even that is more a nominal than a substantial resemblance. For one thing, in F&P it is a matter of linearization of VP constituents as part of the narrow-syntactic derivation, in ES a matter of linearization of adv…
Is There a Little Pro? Evidence from Finnish
The traditional view of the null subject as pro identified by Agr (the φ-features of I) cannot be maintained in a theory where Agr is uninterpretable. Two hypotheses are compared with regard to the predictions they make for Finnish null subject constructions: (A) Agr is interpretable in null subject languages, and pro is therefore redundant; (B) null subjects are specified but unpronounced pronouns that assign values to the uninterpretable featur…
Agreement and movement in Icelandic raising constructions
Scandinavian Stylistic Fronting
The two central theses are (a) the category moved by stylistic fronting (SF) functions as a pure expletive in its derived position, which is [Spec, IP]; (b) what is moved under SF is only the phonological feature matrix of a category. The theory accounts for most of the properties of SF: why it applies only when there is a subject gap; why it affects almost any category, head or phrase; the locality conditions; and the crosslinguistic variation. …
The syntax of answers to polar questions in English and Swedish
A Syntactic Universal and Its Consequences
This article investigates the Final-over-Final Constraint (FOFC): a head-initial category cannot be the immediate structural complement of a head-final category within the same extended projection. This universal cannot be formulated without reference to the kind of hierarchical structure generated by standard models of phrase structure. First, we document the empirical evidence: logically possible but crosslinguistically unattested combinations …
Movement from the Double Object Construction Is Not Fully Symmetrical
A movement asymmetry arises in some languages that are otherwise symmetrical for both A- and Ā-movement in the double object construction, including Norwegian, North-West British English, and a range of Bantu languages including Zulu and Lubukusu: a Theme object can be Ā-moved out of a Recipient (Goal) passive, but not vice versa. Our explanation of this asymmetry is based on phase theory- more specifically, a stricter version of the Phase Impene…
Object symmetry effects in Germanic
This paper focuses on passive symmetry effects in Germanic. We describe two large-sample judgment experiments with native speakers of Norwegian and Swedish, two partially symmetric passive languages. The results fail to support predictions of Anagnostopoulou's (2003) seminal locality approach to passive symmetry in these languages. We propose that constraints on object ordering in these varieties are better modeled on a revised version of classic…
The syntax-morphology relation
Interrogative slifting in English
Topic Particles, Agreement, and Movement in an Arabic Dialect
The dialect of North Hail, a variety of Najdi Arabic, has a set of sentence-initial particles marking topics of various kinds that correspond to those argued by Frascarelli and Hinterhölzl (2007) to be characteristic of Italian and German: Shift-Topic, Contrastive Topic, and Familiar Topic. In their work, as in much other work in the cartographic tradition, a hierarchy of abstract topic heads is postulated in the C-domain, which host the topical …
Reduplication and the structure of nouns in Xining Chinese
In Xining Chinese, especially as used by older people, free nouns are always reduplicated, as a purely formal condition without any semantic effects. We argue that the reduplication takes place when an acategorial root is merged with a null nominal categorizer which copies the phonological matrix of the root, as an effect of a condition ruling out free monosyllabic nouns. When the condition is not independently satisfied, as in a compound or deri…
Truly Minimal Pronouns
Tis paper examines the properties of inclusive generic constructions, focusing on languages where the inclusive generic pronoun is a null category. We investigate empirical data from a set of languages with and without agreement to test Phimsawat's (2011) hypothesis that the inclusive generic pronoun lacks all phi-features, and therefore has the least restricted reading, due to there being no restriction on the reference. We show that this hypoth…
On whimperatives and related questions
In a number of works up to 1974 Jerrold Sadock advanced and defended the claim that there are a limited but distinct number of sentence structures in English which exhibit true illocutionary ambiguity. Structure (1) belongs to this limited number
Icelandic Word Order and Binary Branching
Certain word order facts in Icelandic have been claimed, by several linguists, to provide evidence that Icelandic has no VP constituent (in s-structure) in sentences where the main verb is finite. If correct, this entails that Icelandic phrase structure is not always binary branching, contradicting the hypothesis that all phrase structure is binary branching. It is shown to be incorrect. A new theory of Icelandic sentence structure is presented, …
Topics in Scandinavian Syntax
The Role of Inflection in Scandinavian Syntax
In this book, Holmberg and Platzack present a theory of the role which subject-verb agreement and case morphology play in syntax. Their theory is based mainly on a detailed comparison and inflectional properties in the various Scandinavian languages, although many other languages are discussed as well. The theoretical issues discussed include abstract vs. morphological case, functional heads, verb-second, null subjects and other empty categories,…
Word order in the Germanic languages
The Germanic branch of Indo-European consists of three main groups (Ruhlen 1987: 327):- East Germanic: Gothic, Vandalic, Burgundian (all extinct);- North Germanic (or: Scandinavian): Runic (extinct), Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, Icelandic, Faroese;- West Germanic: German, Yiddish, Luxembourgeois, Dutch, Afrikaans, Frisian, English.Here we will only consider the languages that are currently spoken in geographical Europe. Thus Afrikaans, which is sp…
Remarks on Holmberg’s Generalization
It is argued that the dependence of Scandinavian Object Shift on verb movement, called Holmberg’s Generalization, is a special case of a more general condition preventing Object Shift across any phologically visible category within VP: a verb, a preposition, a verb particle or another argument. Overt movement of the blocking category will always pave the way for Object Shift. The interplay between Object Shift and Verb Topicalization (verb moveme…
Am I Unscientific? A Reply To Lappin, Levine, And Johnson
Scandinavian Stylistic Fronting
The two central theses are (a) the category moved by stylistic fronting (SF) functions as a pure expletive in its derived position, which is [Spec, IP]; (b) what is moved under SF is only the phonological feature matrix of a category. The theory accounts for most of the properties of SF: why it applies only when there is a subject gap; why it affects almost any category, head or phrase; the locality conditions; and the crosslinguistic variation. …
Yes/no questions and the relation between tense and polarity in English and Finnish
It is argued that the structure of the sentence in English as well as Finnish is C [Pol [T...]], where Pol(arity) has negative or affirmative value. Yes/no questions are derived, universally, by movement of a wh -marked Pol to C, deriving an operator-variable relation between C and Pol. No category with interpretable features can intervene between C and Pol, as it would block the crucial relation between C and Pol. It is argued, with reference to…
Agreement and movement in Icelandic raising constructions
Linearization in two ways
What the theories of Fox & Pesetsky (F&P) and Erteschik-Shir (ES) have in common is that they both account for Holmberg’s Generalization (HG) in terms of linearization. That is virtually the only thing they have in common, though, and even that is more a nominal than a substantial resemblance. For one thing, in F&P it is a matter of linearization of VP constituents as part of the narrow-syntactic derivation, in ES a matter of linearization of adv…
Is There a Little Pro? Evidence from Finnish
The traditional view of the null subject as pro identified by Agr (the φ-features of I) cannot be maintained in a theory where Agr is uninterpretable. Two hypotheses are compared with regard to the predictions they make for Finnish null subject constructions: (A) Agr is interpretable in null subject languages, and pro is therefore redundant; (B) null subjects are specified but unpronounced pronouns that assign values to the uninterpretable featur…
Icelandic Dative Intervention
The Scandinavian Languages
‘Free’ inversion in Romance and the Null Subject Parameter
A summary is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content.
Parametric Variation
Parametric variation in linguistic theory refers to the systematic grammatical variation permitted by the human language faculty. Although still widely assumed, the parametric theory of variation has in recent years been subject to re-evaluation and critique. The Null Subject Parameter, which determines among other things whether or not a language allows the suppression of subject pronouns, is one of the best-known and most widely discussed examp…
V-movement in affirmative replies and copy deletion
Parameters in minimalist theory
The P&P theory of UG has come under heavy criticism, lately, from outside but also from inside generative grammar. The claim is that the search for ‘deep parameters’ underlying clusters of properties across languages has led nowhere, and should be given up. I have revisited a theory, now two decades old, which explained ten syntactic differences between Insular and Mainland Scandinavian as the effects of a single parametric difference (in a serie…
Replies to comments
The syntax of answers to polar questions in English and Swedish
The syntax-morphology relation
The Syntax of the Finnish Question Particle
Finnish forms yes-no questions by adjoining the enclitic particle -ko to the first constituent in the sentence. If the question narrowly focuses on some constituent in the sentence, that constituent is fronted, and the clitic is attached to it. A common assumption in such cases is that the clitic is a C element and the focus moves to its left. However, a more careful investigation of the distribution of focus, and a comparison with the focus part…
A Syntactic Universal and Its Consequences
This article investigates the Final-over-Final Constraint (FOFC): a head-initial category cannot be the immediate structural complement of a head-final category within the same extended projection. This universal cannot be formulated without reference to the kind of hierarchical structure generated by standard models of phrase structure. First, we document the empirical evidence: logically possible but crosslinguistically unattested combinations …
Interrogative slifting in English
Case and Other Functional Categories in Finnish Syntax
Philosophy (30 works) · Linguistics (28 works) · Computer Science (23 works) · Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation (22 works) · Mathematics (13 works) · History (12 works) · Natural Language Processing Techniques (11 works) · Linguistics and language evolution (10 works) · Linguistic Variation and Morphology (8 works) · Syntax (8 works)