This paper presents a survey of Faroese wh-nominals, in particular (i) the hvør N construction, (ii) the hvat fyri (ein) N construction, and (iii) the hvat slag av N.dat construction. The first construction involves a wh-item which is used both pronominally, corresponding to English who and what, and adnominally, corresponding to English which, what (N), and what kind of. The second construction is the Faroese version of the was für/what for construction, including versions with and without an indefinite article and with and without both the preposition (fyri) and the indefinite article (i.e. a “bare what” construction). The last construction involves an overt kind noun which must be followed by the preposition av ‘of’ which in turn assigns dative case to the main/head noun. The survey is based on data collected during the NORMS fieldwork in the Faroe Islands in August 2008, focusing on a number of morphosyntactic issues as well as the semantic distinction between kind and token interpretation. The various findings on Faroese are compared to data on other varieties of Germanic, in particular the North Germanic ones.
Washio (1997; 1999) observes that resultative predicates are divided into two different groups, strong and weak resultatives, depending on ‘patienthood’ of the object. This typology of resultatives seems to capture a point of crosslinguistic variation in resultatives;
Japanese has weak but not strong resultatives, while English has both. Washio also observes that there is another group of examples that bears a superficial resemblance to resultatives but constitutes a different phenomenon, hence spurious resultatives. The difference between weak and strong resultatives is made in terms of the ‘affectedness’ of the verb. Thus the typology of resultatives proposed by Washio is semantically grounded. In this paper, I propose: (i) a finegrained distinction for Washio’s weak resultatives: (ii) a syntactic analysis of the different resultative types. On the basis of syntactic evidence, I argue that there are two types of weak resultatives, an adjunct of VP and a complement of VP within the vP projection. I also argue that spurious resultatives are structurally higher than weak resultatives in Japanese.