Grand Meeting 2006 in Solf

Verb movement in Faroese: an old question and a new project

Caroline Heycock & Antonella Sorace, University of Edinburgh

In this talk we will present an outline of a 3-year AHRC-funded project that we (Caroline Heyock, Antonella Sorace, and Zakaris Hansen) are about to begin in September of this year concerning the syntax of contemporary Faroese.

The main question that this project seeks to address is whether or not "V-to-I" - reflected primarily in the placement of the finite verb in subordinate clauses to the left of sentential negation and other adverbs - is still part of the grammar of contemporary Faroese speakers. There is a degree of consensus that some speakers do not allow V-to-I; however there is considerable debate whether there are other speakers who have it as one option. We will be trying to determine whether there are such speakers; whether they are rarer in younger generations than older generations; whether their distribution correlates with an important dialect difference; and whether any such variation is between two grammatical options that are both completely acquired (even if one is preferred) or whether it is the reflection of a written norm imposed on a vernacular grammar without V-to-I, only the latter of which is truly acquired.

In the talk we'll discuss some of the background to our study, including a pilot study that illustrates some of the issues and techniques we propose to use.