When nothing is good enough: Dialectal variation in Norwegian imperatives

This paper presents an analysis of imperative formation in Norwegian. The analysis occasions discussion of variation as reranking in OT, as well as providing a novel example of a grammar in which 'null' is the optimal candidate. The Norwegian imperative is in most cases identical to the verb stem (cf. Faarlund, Lie & Vannebo 1997:477). For verbs having the familiar disyllabic structure with a final schwa in the infinitive, such as å spise, ‘to eat’, å telle, ‘to count’, and å kaste, ‘to throw’, we find the corresponding imperatives spis, tell, and kast. For the smaller class of monosyllabic verbs, such as å gå, ‘to walk’, å gi, ‘to give’, and å be, ‘to pray’, the imperative is also identical to the stem, yielding gå, gi, and be. The focus of this paper is a class of verbs for which the stem ends in a cluster with rising sonority, presenting the speaker with syllabification challenges. Examples include å sykle, ‘to bike’, å åpne, ‘to open’, or å våkne, ‘to wake’, which do not yield the (naïvely) anticipated imperatives sykl, åpn, or våkn. The dialectal variation analyzed in this paper focuses specifically on the different strategies found for producing imperatives for this type of verb. There are at least five dialects (D1-D5) which are documented, including two different dialects in which the null parse is optimal, albeit under varying conditions. Furthermore, anticipating an optimality theoretic analysis, there are plausible but unattested dialects (D6-D7). The range of options is as in the following table, for the verb å sykle, ‘to bike’.