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In this paper, I want to relate three grammatical features that appear to increase in prominence in the languages of Northern Europe as we move from East to West: (i) Low nouniness of infinitives; (ii) Conflation of nominalizer and present participle; and (iii) No or reduced inflection of adjectives.
English displays all three of these features. English infinitives can neither occur with articles, nor govern the genitive; there is a single suffix, -ing, that forms both denominal verbs and present participles; and adjectives are never inflected for number and gender. In all these respects, English contrasts with German, for example. When we bring other languages, such as West Frisian, Dutch, the Scandinavian languages, Finnish, and Russian, into the picture as well, the Western orientation of the features becomes evident.
The link between these features can be found in the way part-of-speech systems are structured in the world’s languages. As conjectured by Hockett (1958) and demonstrated in detail by Stassen (1997) for intransitive predication, there seem to be only three models for inflectional patterns in natural languages: V Model: the inflection of verbs in predicate function, P Model: the inflection of locationals in predicate function, and N Model: the inflection of nouns in identity statements. The same thing appears to hold for patterns of government (Koptjevskaja-Tamm 1993). The inflectional and government patterns of other combinations of part of speech and syntactic function appear to be modelled on one or more of these reference sites.
The distribution of three features that I look at can then be subsumed under a general areal tendency, as we move from East to West in Northern Europe, for a decrease in the force of the N Model and an increase in the force of the P Model.
Other phenomena that fit into this picture are the split of the past participle into two verbal categories – past participle and supine – in Norwegian and Swedish and the fuzzy boundary between the categories of adverb and adjective, present participle and preposition, and adjective and preposition in a number of Northern European Languages.
I will also attempt to relate this areal tendency to other areal tendencies, with wider scope, such as the increased configurationality (Anward & Swedenmark 1997) and decreased B-type character (Stassen, this workshop) of (Western) European languages.
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