Severing the Degree Argument from the Adjective

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. In particular, we argue that gradable adjectives never project a degree argument on their own; such a position is generated by a functional head that is licensed only with certain types of adjectives. We conclude by discussing the implications of our analysis for a general account of the distribution of measure phrases cross-linguistically.

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