Verb second word order and finite verb placement in North American Norwegian

This chapter discusses verb second word order and finite verb placement in North American Norwegian. As in other studies of this phenomenon in heritage languages, verb second word order (V2) in main clauses is robust in this population. Embedded structures, however, are found to be considerably more vulnerable, with a strong tendency for the finite verb to move above negation and adverbials. The chapter discusses possible explanations for these behaviours, suggesting that the high activation of English causes occasional crosslinguistic influence in the production of V2 in Norwegian, while several factors conspire to make the heritage speakers overuse verb movement in embedded structures.