Pragmaticalised determiners in American Norwegian

Abstract

This paper discusses the determiners slik and sånn ‘such (a), like this/that’ in American Norwegian (AmNo), and the extent to which pragmaticalised uses of these determiners, carrying information about the speaker’s attitudes and speaker-hearer relations, can be found. It is shown that pragmaticalised determiners are used, but that their distribution differs in some respects from that in the homeland variety; notably, in AmNo, the lexical variant slik is more common than sånn. It is also shown that although pragmaticalised determiners are robustly attested (at least one subtype, described as a hedging marker), they are overall less frequent than in the homeland. However, the conditions on use of these markers are generally similar in both varieties.