On the negative polarity sensitive indefinite determiner nakar ‘any’ in Faroese

Abstract

This paper reports on fieldwork undertaken during the NORMS dialect workshop in the Faroe Islands in August 2008. I present and discuss findings from a questionnaire study of the negative polarity sensitive indefinite determiner nakar ‘any.’ The questionnaire was constructed on the basis of the findings in Lindstad (1999) for the Norwegian polarity sensitive determiner noen ‘any’. The results indicate that Faroese nakar has a distribution that by and large mimics that of noen. This distribution is also very similar to that of Danish nogen ‘any’ and Icelandic nokkur ‘any,’ but differs considerably from Swedish någon ‘any.’ I did not find any dialectal variation in the distribution of nakar across licensing contexts, only minor variation at the individual level.

Keywords

• Polarity sensitivity
• negative polarity item
• Faroese
• Scandinavian
• variation