Toordssetninger

Toordssetninger refer to utterances consisting of exactly two words. They are a recognized phenomenon in many languages and are often described in studies of early language acquisition and telegraphic speech. In Norwegian usage, they commonly convey a complete proposition through a minimal syntactic structure and rely heavily on context and intonation for interpretation. They may be declarative, interrogative or imperative, and frequently omit auxiliary verbs, definite determiners, and other function words.

In child language development, two-word sequences appear in the period when children combine words but have not yet acquired full sentence grammar. They typically express objects and actions, states, questions or commands, as in "Mamma hjemme" (Mom home), "Hund bjeffer" (Dog barks), "Gå nå" (Go now), or "Jeg vet" (I know). The subject or the verb may be implicit, and inflection is often simplified. As vocabulary grows, these two-word units expand into longer sentences with more complex syntax and morphology.

Linguists study toordssetninger to understand word order, semantic priming, and discourse pragmatics in early speech. The form varies across languages according to dominant word order (S-V, V-S, etc.) and the role of function words. In education and speech-language pathology, two-word utterances can be indicators of typical development or potential delay, and they are used as references in assessments of expressive language. The term is related to the broader concept of telegraphic speech.