Specific constructions
Passive
In Norwegian there are two ways of expressing passive voice: morphological passive and a periphrastic passive construction. The morphological passive is expressed by the passive -s suffix, e.g. bygges “to be built” and the periphrastic passive is constructed with the passive auxiliary bli “to become” and a participle form of the main verb, e.g. opprettet “established”.
Verbal particles
Verbal particles are analyzed using the language-specific relation compound:prt. Particles exhibit a number of syntactic properties which sets them apart from regular prepositions. For instance, a pronominal object may intercede the verb and the preposition in the particle case satte den på “put it on”, but not in the case of a regular preposition and its complement *lette den etter “*looked it for”, and only complements of a preposition may occur in an impersonal passive Det ble lett etter den nye boka “It was looked for the new book”, but an object in a particle construction may not *Det ble satt den på “*It was put it on”.
Expletives
In Norwegian, expletive arguments are expressed using the neuter pronoun det “it” and the expl relation is used for both expletive subjects and objects. Expletives occur in several syntactic constructions in Norwegian.
Presentational construction
In Norwegian expletives occur in the presentational construction, which involves an expletive subject, an active verb and an indefinite subject (en debatt “a debate” in the example below).
Impersonal passive
Norwegian employs the impersonal passive construction, where there is an expletive subject and the underlying subject is unexpressed.
Clause-anticipating constructions
These constructions contain a finite or non-finite clause which semantically may be regarded as the subject, but where the subject position is occupied by an expletive.
We also find clause-anticipating constructions with expletive objects.
Clefts
Clefts are quite common in Norwegian. They contain an expletive subject, a form of være “to be” and a relative clause. Note that in clefts we do not adopt a copula analysis of the verb være “er”.
References
Kari Kinn, Per Erik Solberg and Pål Kristian Eriksen. “NDT Guidelines for Morphological Annotation”. National Library Tech Report.