| dc.description.abstract | This thesis is concerned with compositional definiteness (CD), a special type of definiteness marking found in Norwegian modified definite phrases. In these phrases, definiteness is marked with both a prenominal determiner and a suffixed article (den store bil-en ‘the large car’). CD is crosslinguistically rare, infrequent in corpora, and difficult in the acquisition of both first and second language. I have studied CD in American Norwegian (AmNo), a heritage language spoken in the United States by descendants of Norwegian immigrants. They are all elderly, and the final generation of speakers. I investigated CD through elicited production experiments and an acceptability judgment task, and also tested some of the speakers’ proficiency. The thesis describes CD in AmNo, and how this differs from homeland Norwegian. Three main patterns were observed. First, all speakers frequently omit the prenominal determiner, while the suffixed article is more stable. I suggest a syntactic analysis in which the spell-out of the determiner is optional, and argue that the language input for these speakers has not been sufficient to acquire the obligatory determiner. Second, the suffix is retained in AmNo, but there is a subgroup of speakers who sometimes omit it. I suggest that this is the result of production difficulty caused by attrition, and show that the speakers who omit the suffix are less proficient than the others. Finally, I observed that the definiteness distinction in the plural is disappearing in some speakers. I argue that this can be analyzed as morphological impoverishment and propose that it is related to simplification of the heritage language. Summarizing, the main finding of this thesis is that the linguistic behavior of the AmNo speakers has different sources. With respect to CD, we see the distinct consequences of incomplete acquisition, attrition and simplification. | |