"Sant nok fyller Kjersti 70 år, men ...": The structure of [A NOK] disjuncts

Abstract

Norwegian has a productive class of sentence adverbials, disjuncts of the form adjective + nok ‒ [A nok] for short. Examples include sant nok ‘true (enough)’, paradoksalt nok ‘paradoxically (enough)’, and tåpelig nok ‘foolishly (enough)’. Three structural analyses have been proposed for such constructions in the Scandinavian languages. The first has [A nok] as an adjective phrase, with an adjective head and nok as a modifier, i.e. two words. In the second and third proposal, [A nok] is considered to be one word, viz. an adverb. The proposals differ with respect to word formation type. One considers [A nok] expressions to be compounds, which implies that nok is seen as an adverbial root. The other considers them to be derivatives, with an adverbial suffix -nok. This article studies the grammatical and phonological properties of [A nok] disjuncts in order to determine what kind of constructions they represent. It is argued that they are not single words, but phrases, viz. adverb phrases. nok is an adverbial head taking an adjectival complement.