Northern Norwegian Degree Questions and the Syntax of Measurement

Peter Svenonius and Christopher Kennedy

Norwegian dialects, including Northern Norwegian (NN), make use of degree questions with no overt degree operator (Null Degree Questions, NDQs). These questions have a gradable adjective in situ and subject-verb inversion, for example Er du gammel?, literally `Are you old?', has the interpretation ``How old are you?'' In this paper we provide a detailed syntactic and semantic analysis for NDQs in NN which provides new insight into the decompositional semantics of adjectives more generally. We show how our analysis fits in with current research into the syntax and semantics of measure phrases and comparatives.