The task of reconstructing the reinforced demonstrative paradigm for early Nordic has been called “impossible” by the eminent Einar Haugen. In The History of the Reinforced Demonstrative in Nordic, Eric T. Lander aims to accomplish exactly this, by way of an exhaustive study of the pronoun’s attestations in the Viking Age runic inscriptions, which are the earliest forms of this item to be recorded in Scandinavia. The detailed picture of regional variation that emerges is then used to inform reconstructions of the paradigm from Proto-Nordic to Common Nordic. The book represents the first...

This book is an account of the rise of definite and indefinite articles in Danish, Swedish and Icelandic, as documented in a choice of extant texts from 1200-1550. These three North Germanic languages show different development patterns in the rise of articles, despite the common origin, but each reveals interdependencies between the two processes. The matter is approached from both a quantitative and a qualitative perspective. The statistical analysis provides an improved overview on article grammaticalization, focusing on the factors at the basis of such process. The in-depth qualitative...