Title
Spring cleaning of verb movement in Norwegian and Icelandic

Wiklund, Hróarsdóttir, Hrafnbjargarson, and Bentzen

Date:  11.05.2006

Time:  19:15

Venue:  E010 1

Description
The general picture of the distribution of verb movement in Scandinavian has long been that Icelandic displays verb movement to the inflectional domain independently of V2, whereas Norwegian does not. In this talk we will present data that support the opposite picture; Icelandic does not display independent verb movement to the inflectional domain, whereas Northern Norwegian dialects do. We will argue that both languages display remnant VP-movement to relatively high positions and that both languages have Spec-Fin as the designated subject-position. Differences between the two languages will be shown to follow from two parameters: (i) VP-movement targets high vs. low position (ii) VP-movement is less vs. more remnant.