Article published in:
Germanic Heritage Languages in North America: Acquisition, attrition and change
Edited by Janne Bondi Johannessen † and Joseph C. Salmons
[Studies in Language Variation 18] 2015
► pp. 256–280

Borrowing Modal Elements into American Norwegian

The Case of suppose(d)

| Norwegian University of Science and Technology
| Østfold University College
In a corpus of more than 120 hours of recorded American Norwegian speech we find the word spost, which looks like a non-Norwegian item. This word appears to be in normal use, although Norwegian Americans deny using it. Apparently this is the modal structure ‘be supposed to’ / ‘I suppose’ being borrowed from English into American Norwegian. In this article we examine how these structures are used in American Norwegian, and how they are modified and incorporated into the language. Furthermore we look at the various meanings such constructions have and potential models for it in Norwegian. This study contributes to the literature on borrowing of modal expressions in contact. According to Matras and Sakel (2007), borrowing of verb-related categories, such as modality, is rarely discussed in the literature, although in reality it is quite frequent. Judging by how often modal expressions are borrowed from one language to another, modality itself stands out as category which is prone to borrowing. We also discuss how the use of spost in some instances can be interpreted as a discourse marker, and if it is only the item that is borrowed, or also the grammatical pattern associated with it.
Keywords: bilingual mind, borrowing, convergence, deontic modality, epistemic modality, evidential modality, matter replication, pattern replication
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at rights@benjamins.nl.

Published online: 20 August 2015
https://doi.org/10.1075/silv.18.12eid
Cited by

Cited by other publications

Benor, Sarah Bunin
2015.  In Germanic Heritage Languages in North America [Studies in Language Variation, 18], ► pp. 217 ff. Crossref logo
Johannessen, Janne Bondi
2015.  In Germanic Heritage Languages in North America [Studies in Language Variation, 18], ► pp. 46 ff. Crossref logo
Lundquist, Björn & Anne Dahl
2019. Introduction from our guest editors. The Journal of Comparative Germanic Linguistics 22:2 ► pp. 109 ff. Crossref logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 27 december 2020. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.

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