Jeg lærte noe om norsk grammatikken i dag!
I learned something about Norwegian grammar today!
In my
Grammar Theory course today, we learned about anaphoric binding in lexical-functional grammar.
Basically this deals with the question
How does a computer find out what a pronoun refers to?
This seems to be very complicated in Norwegian, since different pronouns (anaphors) behave in different ways, unlike in English...
The slides our professor showed us were basically copies of the paper
Anaphoric binding and 'inside-out' functional uncertainty by Ronald Kaplan and Mary Dalrymple (Xerox PARC 1995), which you can find at
http://www.essex.ac.uk/linguistics/clmt ... naphora.ps
Enjoy the following examples:
1)
seg selv corefers with a subject, never with an object
"Jon fortalte meg om seg selv" = "Jon told me about himself"
"Jon beundrer seg selv" = "Jon admires himself"
but not: "Vi fortalte Jon om seg self" = "We told Jon about himself", because Jon is the object of "fortale"
2)
ham selv corefers with an object, never with a subject
"Vi fortalte Jon om ham selv" = "We told Jon about him(self)"
"Vi gav Jon ham selv i julegave" = "We gave Jon himself as present"
but not: "Jon respeckterer ham selv" = "Jon respects himself", because Jon is the subject
3)
seg does not corefer with coarguments, i.e. with other arguments of the same verb
"Jon hørte oss snakke om seg" = "Jon heard us talk about him(self)"
but not: "Jon foraktet seg" = "Jon despises himself", because Jon is the subject of "forakte", thus "seg" cannot be an object of the same verb
4)
seg selv does corefer with coarguments
"Jon beundrer seg selv" = "Jon admires himself"
"[Jon's angrep på seg selv] var en overraskelse" = "[Jon's attack on himself] was a surprise"
but maybe not: "Jon leste noen omtaler av seg selv" = "Jon read some report about himself", because some people don't consider the prepositional phrase "av seg selv" to be an object of "lese"
5)
hverandre corefers with an element that has a predicate and a subject ("minimal complete nucleus")
"De fortalte meg om hverandre" = "They told me about each other"
"Jon og Marit leste noen omtaler av hverandre" = "Jon and Marit read some reports about each other"
but not: "De hørte meg snakke om hverandre" = "They heard me talk about each other", because "meg" is the subject of "snakke", not "de"
6)
seg corefers with the minimal element that has a tense ("minimal finite domain")
"Jon bad oss forsøke å få deg til å snakke pent om seg" = "Jon asked us (to) try to get you to talk nicely about (him)self"
but not: "Jon var ikke klar over at vi hadde snakket om seg" = "Jon was not aware that we had talked about him(self)", because "snakke" is not in the infinitive (it has the pluperfect tense), thus "seg" should refer to "vi" instead of "Jon".
So pay attention when using reflexive or reciprocal pronouns in Norwegian...