Stages in deflexion and the Norwegian dative
Original version
Haug, Dag Trygve Truslew [Eds.] Historical Linguistics 2013 p. 179-194, John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2015 10.1075/cilt.334.10berAbstract
The four cases of Old Norse were lost in Norwegian during the Late Middle Ages. The present
paper examines what happened in more detail, aiming to sort out discernible stages in the
deflexion process and suggesting a relative and absolute chronology. Some Modern Norwegian
(and Swedish) dialects still retain a dative case, which in itself shows that case inflection did not
simply disappear. Two main phenomena will be discussed here: a) Former genitivegoverning prepositions
are increasingly found with dative complements, showing that the genitive was lost as a
lexical case; and b) changes in the paradigm of some pronouns and especially the demonstrative
þessi ‘this’ indicate that marking the dative remained decisive. It thus seems that Norwegian at
one stage, presumably much more widely than in present dialects, had a two-case system where
dative was the only marked alternative.