Kristine Bentzen

Her research interests include comparative syntax, language variation, dialect syntax, (first) language acquisition, and bilingualism. She is also the project leader and principal investigator in a project on North Sami child language acquisition (DASAGO), see below.

Bentzen was a PhD student at CASTL (Center for Advanced Study in Theoretical Linguistics) between September 2003 and October 2007, and she was the first candidate to be awarded a PhD from CASTL, in 2007. Her thesis, entitled Order and Structure in Embedded Clauses in Northern Norwegian, was on verb placement in Northern Norwegian and other varieties of Scandinavian.

Research interests

Kristine Bentzen is currently running the project DASAGO (Davvisámegiel mánáid giellaovdáneapmi — North Sami child language development), which she and Berit Anne Bals Baal landed a 7 million NOK grant from the Norwegian Research Council for. The project started in July 2011, and will run until the end of 2017. Within the DASAGO project, Bentzen’s research projects include VO-OV alternations related to information structure in Sami languages (both adult language and acquisition). In addition, she is working on the acquisition of null and overt pronominal subjects, and of negation in North Sami. Within this project we have also adapted the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory (CDI) into North Sami. We are currently conducting extensive investigations of vocabulary development using this tool.

Kristine is a member of the LAVA research group (Language Acquisition, Variation & Attrition). Her research focus within this group is on acquisition and variation. Many of her ongoing projects revolve around variation related to the interface between syntax and information structure, both in adult language and in acquisition. One recent and ongoing project re-examines object shift in Mainland Scandinavian (joint with Merete Anderssen), as well as how these complex patterns are acquired by children across Mainland Scandinavian languages (joint with Merete Anderssen, and Christian Waldmann in Umeå). Another ongoing project involved the availability of embedded V2 in Norwegian. Based on that from  The Nordic Dialect Corpus she is investigating the distribution and interpretation of embedded V2 across different types of that-clauses.

She is also a member of the CASTL-FISH research group.

Recent publications, manuscripts, etc.

2015

• Kristine Bentzen. (2015): ‘Mapping information structure and word order: The acquisition of object placement.’ In Ludovica Serratrice & Shanley Allen (eds.) The Acquisition of Reference. John Benjamins (Trends in Language Acquisition Series).

• Bentzen, Kristine, Henrik Rosenkvist & Janne Bondi Johannessen (eds.). (2015): Studies in Övdalian Morphology and Syntax – new research on a lesser-known Scandinavian language. Amsterdam: John Benjamins (The Linguistik Aktuell series).
NB! Note that the whole volume is downloadable for free here:
Download site: http://www.jbe-platform.com/content/books/9789027269133

2014

• ‘Setninger med kanskje i forfeltet i skandinavisk, med fokus på norsk og svensk,’ in Språk i Norge og nabolanda. Ny forskning om talespråk [Languages in Norway and the neighbouring countries. New research on spoken language]. Novus forlag, pp. 27-45.

• ‘Verb placement in main and embedded clauses,´ Nordic Atlas of Language Structures (NALS) Journal, Vol.1, 207-210.

• ‘Embedded Verb Second (V2),´ Nordic Atlas of Language Structures (NALS) Journal, Vol.1, 211-224.

• ‘Verb placement in clauses with initial adverbial maybe,´ Nordic Atlas of Language Structures (NALS) Journal, Vol.1, 225-239.

• ‘Verb placement in relative clauses,´ Nordic Atlas of Language Structures (NALS) Journal, Vol.1, 240-249.

• ‘The middle field,´ (joint with Björn Lundquist) Nordic Atlas of Language Structures (NALS) Journal, Vol.1, 266-269.

• ‘Object Shift,´ Nordic Atlas of Language Structures (NALS) Journal, Vol.1, 332-343.

• ‘Subject placement with respect to negation,´ Nordic Atlas of Language Structures (NALS) Journal, Vol.1, 344-352.

• ‘Subject and object extraction from embedded clauses,´ Nordic Atlas of Language Structures (NALS) Journal, Vol.1, 435-446.

• ‘Variable verb placement in embedded clauses: Comparing English and Norwegian children,´ (joint with Marit Westergaard, Antonella Sorace & Caroline Heycock), in Inquiries into Linguistic Theory and Language Acquisition: Papers offered to Adriana Belletti. Siena: CISCL Press, pp. 229-238.

2013

• ‘Deep properties of surface pronouns: Pronominal predicate anaphors in Norwegian and German.’(joint with Jason Merchant and Peter Svenonius). Journal of Comparative Germanic Linguistics 16, 97-125.

• ‘Object Shift in spoken Mainland Scandinavian: A corpus study of Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish.’(joint with Merete Anderssen and Christian Waldmann). Nordic Journal of Linguistics 36.2, 115-151.

• A special issue of Nordic Journal of Linguistics 36.2 on Object Shift (together with Maia Andréasson and Elisabet Engdahl).

• ‘Cross-linguistic influence outside the syntax-pragmatics interface: A case study of the acquisition of definiteness.’ (joint with Merete Anderssen). Studia Linguistica 67.1, 82–100.

• ‘The acquisition of language variation,’ a special issue of Studia Linguistica 67.1  (together with Marit Westergaard).

2012

• ‘Flerspråklighet gir mange fordeler! / Moattegielakvuohta vaddá moadda åvddåmåne!’ [The many benefits of bilingualism]. Stullán nr. 2, pp. 6-7.

• ‘Are movement paths punctuated or uniform?’ (Joint with Klaus Abels). In Artemis Alexiadou, Tibor Kiss, and Gereon Müller (eds.) Local Modelling of Non-Local Dependencies in Syntax, Linguistische Arbeiten 547, Mouton de Gruyter, pp. 415-436.

• ‘Topicality and complexity in the acquisition of Norwegian Object Shift.’ (Joint with Merete Anderssen & Yulia Rodina) Language Acquisition, 19.1:39-72.

• ‘Norwegian Object Shift as IP-internal topicalization,’ (Joint with Merete Anderssen) Nordlyd 39.1: The Grammar of Objects, 1-23.

• Nordlyd 39.1: Special issue on The Grammar of Objects, edited jointly with Antonio Fábregas.

• ‘Vet du kor du bør helst sette inn verbet hen? Om verbplassering i nordnorsk,’ [Do you know where you should rather place the verb? on verb placement in Northern Norwegian]. (Joint with Marit Westergaard and Merete Anderssen). CASTL Special issue of Ottar 2.290: 25-31.

• ‘Det vil æ ikke eller Det vil ikke æ: Ordstilling i nordnorsk barnespråk,’ [Det vil æ ikke or Det vil ikke æ: Word order in Northern Norwegian child language]. (Joint with Marit Westergaard and Merete Anderssen). CASTL Special issue of Ottar 2.290: 10-16.

• ‘Min bil eller bilen min: Eiendomskonstruksjoner i norsk barnespråk og amerikanorsk,’ [Min bil or bilen min: Possessive constructions in Norwegian child language and America-Norwegian]. (Joint with Merete Anderssen and Marit Westergaard). CASTL Special issue of Ottar 2.290: 17-24.

Upcoming talks

• March 9-11, 2016: ‘VO-OV alternations in North Sami’, at Aktasne II — Together II: New concepts, theories and methodologies in Saami studies in Umeå, Sweden.

Recent talks

• September 5, 2013: ‘Hvordan tilegner barn seg språk? Språkutvikling hos enspråklige og flerspråklige barn.’ Invited talk on bilingualism on behalf of Flere språk til flere at a seminar for teachers, Bergen, Norway.

• September 7, 2013: ‘Cross-linguistic transfer of V2 in bilingual acquisition: Structural overlap and complexity.’ Poster presentation at Generative Approaches to Language Acquisition (GALA), Oldenburg, Germany, September 5-7.

• May 13-15, 2013: ‘Object Shift in spoken Mainland Scandinavian.’ (joint with Merete Anderssen and Christian Waldmann). At the workshop Information Structure in Scandinavian Languages at the Scandinavian Conference of Linguistics in Reykjavík, Iceland.

• May 13-15, 2013: ‘Cross-linguistic influence in bilingual acquisition: How English can become a V2 language.’ At the workshop Syntactic Issues in Language Acquisition at the Scandinavian Conference of Linguistics in Reykjavík, Iceland.

• May 7, 2013: ‘Ja til flerspråklighet! Fordeler med å kunne mer enn ett språk.’ (joint with Merete Anderssen). Invited talk on bilingualism on behalf of Flere språk til flere at a network meeting on multilingualism (Nettverksmøte om flerspråklighet), Lenvik kommune, Norway.

• April 10, 2013: ‘DASAGO – Davvisámegiel mánáid giellaovdáneapmi: A project on North Sami child language acquisition.’ At the Latvian-Norwegian Acquisition Workshop. University of Tromsø.

• April 6, 2013: ‘Cross-linguistic influence and structural overlap affecting English verb placement.’ At the workshop Acquisition of Syntax in Close Varieties at GLOW 36 in Lund, Sweden.

• March 8, 2013: ‘Meaning in syntax and context: Variable placement of Norwegian VP anaphor det ‘it’,’at the Workshop on Context and Syntax, University of Tromsø, Norway.

• February 8, 2013: ‘Studier av dialektsyntax: En skörd från ScanDiaSyn.’ (joint with Piotr Garbacz, Björn Lundquist & Ida Larsson), at Grammatik i Fokus, Lund, Sweden.

• January 11, 2013: ‘Korpusstudier: En tio-i-topp-lista.’ (joint with Piotr Garbacz, Ida Larsson, and Björn Lundquist) Invited talk at Nordisk dialektforskning – seminar om talespråket i Nordisk dialektkorpus [Nordic dialect research – seminar on spoken language in the Nordic Dialect Corpus], University of Oslo.

• November 19, 2012: ‘Flere språk til flere! Tospråklighet gir mer enn bare to språk,’ invited talk on behalf of Flere språk til flere at the annual Morsmålskonferanse [Mother tongue conference] in Bergen.

• November 14, 2012: ‘Flerspråklighet og samisk språkinnlæring’ [Multilingualism and Sami language acquisition]. Invited talk at Samisk nasjonal barnehage- og skolekonferanse [Sami national kindergarten and school conference] in Tromsø.

• September 13, 2012: ‘The verb placement challenge in language acquisition: Parameters, micro-cues and vulnerable interfaces?’ (joint with Marit Westergaard) at Decennium: The first 10 years of CASTL, University of Tromsø, Norway.

• September 13, 2012: ‘Object placement and the interaction of syntax and information structure’ (joint with Merete Anderssen, Roksolana Mykhaylyk, Yulia Rodina and Marit Westergaard) at Decennium: The first 10 years of CASTL, University of Tromsø, Norway.

• September 13, 2012: ‘Complexity and frequency in the acquisition Norwegian DPs’ (joint with Merete Anderssen, Yulia Rodina and Marit Westergaard) at Decennium: The first 10 years of CASTL, University of Tromsø, Norway.

• August 13-16, 2012: ‘Norwegian gjøre det: Deep or surface anaphora?’ (joint with Peter Svenonius and Jason Merchant) at the N’CLAV Grand Meeting at Lysebu, Oslo, Norway.

• May 31-June 1, 2012: ‘Deep properties of surface pronouns: Pronominal predicate anaphors in Norwegian and other Germanic languages,’ (joint with Jason Merchant and Peter Svenonius) at The 27th Comparative Germanic Syntax Workshop, Yale University.

• May 11, 2012: ‘Extraction from embedded V2 clauses in Norwegian,’ at the Mini workshop in connection with Éva Dékány’s doctoral defence, University of Tromsø, Norway.

• March 28-30, 2012: ‘Discourse Effects on the Availability of Object Shift,’ (joint with Merete Anderssen). Poster presentation at GLOW 35, Potsdam, Germany.

• March 22-23, 2012: ‘Norwegian Object Shift: The role of reference and topichood,’ (joint with Merete Anderssen) at a workshop on Object Shift in Gothenburg, Sweden.

• February 23, 2012: ‘New perspectives on Norwegian Object Shift: The importance of topichood,’ (joint with Merete Anderssen) at the CASTL Colloquium, Tromsø, Norway.

• January 12, 2012: ‘DASAGO — MCDI adaptation into North Sami,’ (joint with Berit Anne Bals Baal) at the NorPhLex seminar (Phonological and lexical acquisition in mono- and bilingual children in the Nordic and the Baltic states), Oslo, Norway.

Selected previous papers, etc. (prior to 2012)

(Go here for list of earlier papers/manuscripts)

2011

• ‘Splitting up the V-to-I parameter.’ In Suzi Lima, Kevin Mullin and Brian Smith (eds.) Proceedings of North Eastern Linguistic Society (NELS) 39, GLSA Amherst, pp. 83-95.

2010

• ‘Exploring embedded main clause phenomena: The irrelevance of factivity and some challenges from V2 languages.’ In Theoretical Linguistics, 36.2, 163-172, 2010.

• ‘Observations on extraction from V2 clauses in Scandinavian.’ (Joint with Gunnar Hrafn Hrafnbjargarson and Anna-Lena Wiklund). In Nordic Journal of Linguistics 33.3, 299-309, 2010.

• Variation in the Input: Studies in the Acquisition of Word Order (Jointly edited with Merete Anderssen and Marit Westergaard).Springer Verlag, 2010.

• ‘The acquisition of apparent optionality: Word order in subject and object shift constructions in Norwegian.’ (Joint with Merete Anderssen, Yulia Rodina, and Marit Westergaard). In Merete Anderssen, Kristine Bentzen, and Marit Westergaard (eds.) Variation in the Input: Studies in the Acquisition of Word Order. Springer Verlag, 2010.

• ‘From a V2 grammar to no verb movement: A step-wise approach.’ (joint with Þorbjörg Hróarsdóttir).  In Rajat Mohanty and Mythili Menon (eds.) Universals and Variation: Proceedings of GLOW in Asia VII 2009, pp. 117-139. Hyderabad: EFL University Press.

• ‘Word order and finiteness in the acquisition of English and Norwegian wh-questions.’ (Joint with Marit Westergaard). In Proceedings of the 34th annual Boston University Conference on Language Development, Volume 2, pp. 457-467.

2009

• ‘On variation in Faroese verb placement.’ (Joint with Piotr Garbacz, Caroline Heycock, and Gunnar Hrafn Hrafnbjargarson). Nordlyd 36.2: NORMS Papers on Faroese 78-102, 2009.

• ‘Subject positions and their interaction with verb movement.’ Studia Linguistica 63.3: 1-31, 2009.

• ‘On the distribution and illocution of V2 in Scandinavian that-clauses.’ (Joint with Anna-Lena Wiklund, Gunnar Hrafn Hrafnbjargarson, and Þorbjörg Hróarsdóttir). Lingua 119.12: 1914-1938, 2009.

• ‘A note on the punctuated nature of movement paths.’ (Joint with Klaus Abels). In Jordi Fortuny and Ángel Gallego (eds.) Catalan Journal of Linguistics 8: Spelling Out Universal Grammar, pp. 19-40.

Earlier

• Order and Structure in Embedded clauses in Northern Norwegian, PhD dissertation, CASTL, University of Tromsø, Norway. 2007. [Downloadable here.]

• ‘Rethinking Scandinavian verb movement,’ (joint with Anna-Lena Wiklund, Gunnar Hrafn Hrafnbjargarson, and Þorbjörg Hróarsdóttir), Journal of Comparative Germanic Linguistics, 10(3), pp. 203-233. 2007.

• ‘The (non-) effect of input frequency on the acquisition of word order in Norwegian embedded clauses,’ (joint with Marit Westergaard), in Insa Gülzow and Natalia Gagarina (eds.) Frequency Effects in Language Acquisition. Defining the limits of frequency as an Explanatory Concept, pp. 271-306. 2007. [a previous version of the paper is available on LingBuzz].

• ‘What’s the better move? On verb placement in Standard and Northern Norwegian,’ Nordic Journal of Linguistics, 28.2, pp.153-188. 2005. [a previous version of the paper is available on Lingbuzz]

Previous talks, etc. (prior to 2012)

(Go here for list of presentations prior to 2009)

• November 29, 2011: ‘Fordeler med å være tospråklig: Gir mer enn bare to språk!’ invited talk at a seminar for parents on children’s multilingualism (joint with Yulia Rodina), Trondheim, Norway.

• November 29, 2011: ‘Tilegnelse av flere språk samtidig: Fordeler med å være tospråklig’ invited talk at a seminar for teachers on multilingualism as a resource (joint with Yulia Rodina), Trondheim, Norway.

• November 10, 2011: ‘Barneprat er ikke bare babbel! — Om barnespråksforskningen ved HSL-fakultetet,’ invited talk on language acquisition at a seminar for the administration at our faculty, (joint with Merete Anderssen), Tromsø, Norway.

• October 18, 2011: ‘Flere språk til Flere! Språktilegnelse og fordeler med tospråklighet,’ invited talk at Tromsdalen Barnehage (joint with Merete Anderssen), Tromsø, Norway.

• ‘Scandinavian Object Shift revisited: The relevance of (types of) topichood,’ (joint with Merete Anderssen) at the 10th International Conference on the Structure of Hungarian, Lund, Sweden, August 25-28, 2011.

• ‘DASAGO – a new project on North Sami child language,’ at the 2nd N’CLAV Grand Meeting, Göteborg, Sweden, August 22-25, 2011.

• ‘The acquisition of word order in questions in English and Norwegian: Frames vs. micro-cues,’ (Joint with Marit Westergaard) at the symposium Rules versus Constructions: A debate on question acquisition at the International Congress for the Study of Child Language (IASCL), Montreal, Canada, July 19-23, 2011.

• ‘Scandinavian Object Shift reanalysed as TP-internal topicalization,’ (joint with Merete Anderssen) at CGSW 26 (Comparative Germanic Syntax Workshop), Amsterdam, The Netherlands, June 23-24, 2011.

• ‘The (over)production of prenominal determiners in definite contexts in a Norwegian/English bilingual child,’ (joint with Merete Anderssen) at ISB8 (International Symposium on Bilingualism), Oslo, June 15-18, 2011.

• ‘The status of the embedded V-Neg word order,’ invited talk at the Workshop on Main/Embedded Clause Asymmetries in Scandinavian, Lund, Sweden, April 14-15, 2011.

• ‘Topicality and complexity in the acquisition of Norwegian Object Shift’ at the VAMOS workshop, Tromsø, April 4-5, 2011.

• ‘Introduction on Object Shift’ at the DGfS workshop Word Order Variation and Typology: The German Middle Field in a Comparative and Diachronic Perspective, Göttingen, Germany, February 23-25, 2011.

• ‘Embedded V2 and extraction in Faroese and Norwegian: Results from parallel experiments’ (Joint with Caroline Heycock) at the workshop Verb Movement: Its nature, triggers, and effects, Amsterdam, December 11-12, 2010.

• ‘What microvariation studies can tell us about children’s errors,’ at Nordic Language Variation: Grammatical, Sociolinguistic and Infrastructural Perspectives, University of Iceland, Reykjavík, October 7-9, 2010.

• ‘The acquisition of finiteness and inversion in English and Norwegian wh-questions,’ (joint with Marit Westergaard), at the CIAL 6, Barcelona, Spain, September 8-10, 2010.

• ‘Finiteness and word order in the acquisition of English and Norwegian wh-questions,’ (joint with Marit Westergaard), at the Workshop on Tense and Aspect in Generative Grammar, Lisbon, Portugal, July 1-2, 2010.

• ‘The movement of verbs around Scandinavia,’ (Joint with Piotr Garbacz and Caroline Heycock) at the NORMSClosing Seminar in Tromsø, Norway, June 10, 2010.

• ‘Finiteness in wh-questions in English and Norwegian child language,’ at a CASTL mini workshop in Tromsø, Norway, May 19, 2010.

• ‘Finiteness and word order: The acquisition of wh-questions in English and Norwegian,’ (Joint with Marit Westergaard) at a workshop on Finiteness at NTNU in Trondheim, Norway, May 6-7, 2010.

• ‘The acquisition of Object Shift: A challenge at the syntax-pragmatics interface,’ (Joint with Merete Anderssen and Yulia Rodina) at the workshop Information Structure in Language Acquisition at DGfS 32 (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Sprachwissenschaft), at the Humboldt University, Berlin, February 23-26, 2010.

• ‘Word order and finiteness in English and Norwegian child language: Parameters vs. cues,’ (Joint with Marit Westergaard) at BUCLD 34 (Boston University Conference on Language Development), Boston, Mass., November 6-8, 2009.

• ‘Embedded root phenomena in Scandinavian and English: The (ir)relevance of assertion and presupposition,’ guest talk at University of Massachusetts, Amherst, November 3, 2009.

• ‘Nordnorske barns tilegnelse av “Object Shift”,’ (Joint with Merete Anderssen and Yulia Rodina), at Seminar om nordnorske språkforhold [Seminar on languages in Northern Norway], University of Tromsø, Norway, September 28, 2009.

• ‘The Acquisition of Focus: The case of object shift,’ (Joint with Merete Anderssen and Yulia Rodina), at Generative Approaches to Language Acquisition (GALA), Lisbon, Portugal, September 9-11, 2009.

•‘Embedded root phenomena, assertion, presupposition, and main point of utterance,’ Invited talk at the workshop Root Phenomena, Centre for General Linguistics (ZAS), Berlin, Germany, September 2-4, 2009.

• ‘The development of syntax in micro-Scandinavians: Object Shift in Norwegian child language,’ (Joint with Merete Anderssen and Yulia Rodina), at The 2009 Grand Meeting for the Network for Scandinavian Dialect Syntax, Älvdalen, Sweden, August 25-29, 2009.