Jan Terje Faarlund

• 1. Introduction

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  Jan Terje Faarlund spent decades explaining Norwegian grammar, then used one paper to challenge the family tree of English itself. Born on the 3rd of May 1943, he became a professor emeritus of North Germanic languages at the University of Oslo. Where did that grammar background take him, and why would a specialist in Norwegian syntax challenge what nearly every linguist accepts about English's origins? What honors came his way for the scholarship that surrounded that claim?

• 2. The Making Of A Grammarian

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  Faarlund was born in Østre Toten Municipality. His academic career opened with a 1974 magister dissertation, Preposisjonsuttrykkenes syntaks i moderne norsk, or Prepositional Phrase Syntax in Modern Norwegian. He went on to do substantial work on grammatical issues in Norwegian. He coauthored Norsk referansegrammatikk, the Norwegian Reference Grammar, in 1997, one of his most extensive projects.

  Earlier in his career, Faarlund worked as a professor at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. Marianne Gullestad, a social anthropologist who lived from 1946 to 2008, became his wife after two earlier marriages. It was a partnership that placed two very different academic disciplines under one roof.

• 3. A Case For Norse English

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  In a 2014 paper written with linguist Joseph Embley Emonds, Faarlund argued that English is fundamentally a Scandinavian language. Titled English: The Language of the Vikings, the paper argues English belongs to the North Germanic family, not West Germanic. Anglo-Saxon, a West Germanic language, shaped English early on but eventually died out, according to Faarlund and Emonds.

  This view runs counter to the mainstream position. Most linguists hold that English is a direct descendant of Anglo-Saxon, merely influenced by the Norse language of the Vikings. Faarlund and Emonds' assertion therefore places English's closest relatives as Swedish and Norwegian, displacing German, Frisian, and Dutch from that role.

  In 2013, a year before this paper appeared, Faarlund received the Gad Rausing Prize for Outstanding Research in the Humanities. It came from the Royal Swedish Academy of Letters, History and Antiquities.

• 4. Academies And A Longer Shelf

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  The London Philological Society welcomed Faarlund as a member in 1977, the earliest of several honors that followed. Six years later, in 1983, he was elected to the Royal Norwegian Society of Sciences and Letters. By 1996, he had become a member of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters.

  In 1990, Faarlund published Syntactic Change: Towards a Theory of Historical Syntax, the first of several books on grammatical theory. Grammatical Relations in Change followed in 2001, then The Syntax of Old Norse in 2004. In 2005 came Revolusjon i lingvistikken: Noam Chomskys språkteori, a work on Noam Chomsky's language theory published in Norwegian. Two years later, in 2007, he published the paper Parameterization and Change in Non-Finite Complementation.

  The 2007 paper on non-finite complementation added one more study of grammatical change, continuing to shape how the field analyzes syntax.