Strangely enough: The rise of a sentence- adverbial construction

Previous research has found that Norwegian has one productive sentence-adverbial construction, viz. expressions such as underlig nok ‘strangely enough’. Their constituents are an adjective in the positive indefinite singular neuter and the word nok, originally ‘enough, sufficient(ly)’. Research on Swedish indicates that such sentence adverbials started to appear in the late 18th century, and possible origins have been suggested. This article presents a study of 18th and 19th century texts with the aim of determining the origins of this construction. The evidence best supports a language-internal development from predicate complements of a preceding or matrix clause.