Hybrid Verb Forms in American Norwegian and the Analysis of the Syntactic Relation between the Verb and its Tense

Abstract

English roots/stems that are nonce borrowed into American Norwegian regularly show Norwegian tense inflection. In this article, I use data of such hybrid verb forms as a starting-point for an investigation of the general theoretical analysis of the morpho-syntactic relation between a verbal stem and its tense affix. I argue that the hybrid verb forms in American Norwegian should be taken as evidence that it is not the case that verbs (and inflected words generally) are fully listed with inflectional features in the lexicon and subsequently checked for their inflectional features in the syntax (as suggested in recent minimalist analyses). Instead, I argue that what is contained in the lexicon are the bare verbal root or stems, and that tense morphology is syntactically assigned to the root/stem during the derivation.