Long-Distance Extraction and Islands

A long-distance dependency is what you get when a word stands at the front of a sentence but belongs, grammatically, to a clause buried deep inside it. In Hvem tror du kommer? ("Who do you think is coming?"), hvem is the subject of kommer — but it has travelled all the way to the front of the main clause, leaving a silent gap behind. English does this too. What makes Norwegian remarkable is how far it lets the word travel and through what: Mainland Scandinavian permits extractions out of structures that English treats as sealed "islands," including relative clauses. This is one of the most celebrated typological features of the language, and it is almost completely absent from learner materials. This page assumes you already know basic topicalisation (the fronting of one element in a single clause); here we cross clause boundaries.

The filler and the gap

Every long-distance dependency has two parts: a filler at the front and a gap (the empty position it came from) somewhere downstream. The two are linked across any amount of intervening material:

Here den boka is the object of lest, but it sits at the very front, two clauses up. The gap after lest is where it "really" belongs. Norwegian, being a V2 language, then forces the finite verb tror into second position in the main clause — so the filler occupies slot 1 and the dependency stretches downward from there.

Long-distance questions across an at-clause

The core pattern is extraction out of an embedded at ("that") clause. The question word is asked about the inner clause but appears at the very front of the whole sentence:

Two things differ from English here. First, the complementiser at is optional and, crucially, can stay even when you extract the subject. English forbids exactly this: "Who do you think *that _ is coming?" is ungrammatical (the famous that-trace effect). Norwegian has no robust that-trace effect — Hvem tror du at kommer? is fine for many speakers, though some prefer to drop at there. Treat the at-retention as available but stylistically lighter when you've extracted the subject.

Long-distance topicalisation

Statements work the same way: any embedded element can be fronted to the top of the main clause, leaving its gap behind.

This is extremely common in ordinary spoken Norwegian. A speaker takes the most salient piece of information, parks it in slot 1, and lets the rest of the sentence — including embedded clauses — flow underneath it. Where English would often reach for a cleft ("It's that house that I think he built"), Norwegian simply fronts and gaps.

Extraction from relative clauses — the famous quirk

Here is where Norwegian leaves English behind entirely. In English, a relative clause is a hard island: you cannot question or topicalise out of it. "That house, I know a man who built _" is flatly ungrammatical. In Norwegian, the equivalent is *grammatical and idiomatic:

Read those English glosses again: every one is broken English, yet every Norwegian sentence is something a native speaker might genuinely produce. The filler (det huset, sånne biler) is the object of the verb inside the relative clause (bygd, råd til, forstår), and the gap sits there — across the relative pronoun som and everything else. Scandinavian linguists have studied this since the 1970s; it is a textbook example of a language whose island constraints are far weaker than English's.

It is fair to be honest about the limits. These extractions are gradient and colloquial: they are far more at home in speech and informal prose than in stiff formal writing, and acceptability rises when the relative clause is "light" and presentational (after kjenne, vet om, finnes, har) rather than a heavy, referential one. Not every relative clause is equally transparent, and individual speakers vary. But the contrast with English is categorical: where English says "no, never," Norwegian says "often yes."

Why Norwegian allows what English bans

The deep reason is debated, but the most useful intuition is informational. In Norwegian, a relative clause attached to an indefinite, presentational noun (en mann som..., ingen som..., folk som...) often functions less as a self-contained modifier and more as a single predicate about the topic — almost "there's-a-man-built-it." Because the whole structure behaves like one flat assertion rather than a noun with a sealed-off modifier, the inside stays accessible to fronting. English keeps its relative clauses syntactically opaque no matter how light they are, so the gap inside can never link to a filler outside. You do not need to resolve the theory to use the construction — but knowing why it feels like one unit helps you recognise the cases where it sounds best.

Common Mistakes

English speakers, used to the that-trace ban, sometimes patch the sentence with an extra pronoun. Norwegian wants the gap left genuinely empty — there is no subject pronoun, because hvem is the subject.

Because the English equivalent is impossible, learners instinctively plug the hole with a pronoun (det). In standard Norwegian extraction the gap is silent; the fronted det huset already fills the object role.

The most common error is invisible: not making the mistake at all because you avoid the whole construction. Trust the Norwegian pattern and front the topic directly.

The fronted hva is the object of ha in the deepest clause; it does not get echoed by det near sa.

Key Takeaways

• Norwegian links a fronted filler to a silent gap across any number of clause boundaries; V2 still pins the finite verb in second place in the main clause.
• The complementiser at is optional and can stay even with subject extraction — there is no firm that-trace effect, unlike English.
• Norwegian permits extraction from relative clauses (Det huset kjenner jeg en mann som har bygd), which English bans outright. The construction is gradient and colloquial but genuinely native.
• The English speaker's real risk is under-using this freedom. Leave the gap empty; do not insert a resumptive pronoun.