Senior Professor, Scandinavian Languages

I have been an active researcher in Icelandic and Nordic philology and grammar since 1981 and in general theoretic and descriptive syntax and morphosyntax since 1983. My Icelandic MA dissertation (1983, published 1994) was about Old Norse word order from philological, text- linguistic and syntax-theoretic perspectives. My Swedish dissertation (1989, republished 1992) analyzed word formation, word order and Case/case in Icelandic, in comparison with other Germanic languages, within the framework of generative grammar. Until 1985, I mainly studied phonology, morphology and historical linguistics, but after that theoretic and Icelandic and Germanic syntax became my major fields of inquiry. Case and agreement have been central in my research, but in recent years I have also focused on Person, Tense and Mood, developing a general theory about the relationship between form and content in these and other grammatical categories, as well as the relationship between these categories and the context of the clause in a neo-performative perspective.

In 2016-2018 I receive funding from Riksbankens Jubileumsfond for the project ””Jag vill vara dig”: Nominative and oblique case in Modern Swedish”. The project will study the use of pronominal case in Swedish, partly in relation to my earlier research on case and other pronominal features.