When covert modality sneaks into your grammar: wh-infinitives in American Norwegian

American Norwegian (AmNo), a moribund heritage variety of Norwegian spoken predominantly in the Upper Midwest of the US, licenses wh-infinitives (i.e. indirect questions), which are structures that are not acceptable in either standard Norwegian Bokmål or Norwegian dialects. Adopting a spanning-account of syntax (Blix, 2021; Julien, 2021; Svenonius, 2016), we propose that wh-elements in AmNo can encode covert modality (similar to what is found in English indirect questions). We discuss these results and their impact on our understanding of the nature of syntactic change and the interaction of spanning in combination with Aʹ-movement in heritage language syntax.