Microvariation as Diachrony: A View from Acquisition

This paper discusses some microvariation found in main clause wh-questions in Norwegian dialects, where V2 (verb-second) word order occurs alongside non-V2. The microvariation is related to the type of wh-constituent present and is argued to represent different stages of a diachronic development (see also Vangsnes 2005, Westergaard 2005). The paper investigates a corpus of spontaneous speech from eight adults and three children (altogether 70 hours of recordings), all speaking Northern dialects of Norwegian (mainly Tromsø). It has often been argued that there is a word order distinction in the Tromsø dialect based on the length of the wh-constituent, long wh-words and full wh-phrases requiring V2, and monosyllabic wh-words allowing both word orders. This paper shows that the distinctions are finer than this: All speakers show a somewhat higher frequency of non-V2 with the question word ka ‘what’ than the other two monosyllabic wh-elements kor ‘where’ and kem ‘who’. Two of the speakers allow non-V2 also with longer wh-elements, but for these there is a considerable difference in frequency between the monosyllabic and the disyllabic wh-words, and then again between the latter and the full wh-phrases. Thus, the option to use non-V2 is a clear function of the complexity of the wh-element. This is illustrated for one individual speaker in Table 1.