This article deals with two syntactic differences between Present-Day Swedish (PDSw) and Early Modern Swedish (EMSw): first, only EMSw allows VS and XVS word order to occur in relative clauses; second, only EMSw permits non-verb-initial imperatives. One structural difference between the varieties is assumed to be a prerequisite for all these word order differences: the subject position was spec-TP in EMSw but is spec-FinP in PDSw. Only the lower position (spec-TP) is compatible with inversion (VS) and fronting of non-subjects (XVS) in relative clauses as well as with imperative clauses having elements other than the imperative verb in the initial position. To be able to account for the latter phenomenon, however, an additional assumption is needed: the imperative type-feature, [imp], always accompanies the verb in PDSw but is tied to an operator in EMSw. The first assumption about differing subject positions is independently motivated by findings already in the previous literature. The second assumption about the differing behaviour of [imp] in the two varieties is supported by the distribution of imperative verbs over a wider range of syntactic contexts in EMSw than in PDSw.

The distance or similarity between two languages can be objective or actual, i.e. discoverable by the tools and methods of linguists, or perceived by users of the languages. In this article two methods, the Levenshtein Distance (LD), which purports to measure the objective distance, and the Index of Perceived Similarity (IPS), which quantifies language users’ perceptions, are compared. The data are the quantitative results of a test measuring conscious perceptions of similarity between Estonian and Finnish inflectional morphology by Finnish and Estonian native speakers (‘Finns’ and ‘Estonians’) with no knowledge of and exposure to the other (‘target’) language. The results show that Finns see more similarity between Finnish and Estonian than Estonians do. Also the correlations between LD and the perception results of the Finns are statistically significant while the correlations between the LD and the IPS scores of the Estonians are not. Comments by test participants provide insights into the nature of the perceptions of similarity.

Swedish grammatical gender is challenging for Finnish-speaking learners of Swedish due to its abstract meaning, the complex nature of Swedish NPs and the low salience of the morphology used to mark gender. Our study compares the expression of gender in texts written in Swedish by Finnish-speaking 12- and 15-year-old immersion students with that of 16-year-old non-immersion students. The results show that NPs with gender agreement, i.e. those with several morphemes marking gender, are more difficult than NPs with only one marker. In all informant groups, uter is significantly easier than neuter, but uter is also overused, as approximately 75% of all Swedish nouns are uter in modern Swedish. Comparisons between different informant groups show that non-immersion students often reach a significantly higher level of accuracy than immersion students, which indicates that formal teaching has a positive effect.

In cognitive semantics metaphors are cross-domain mappings in the conceptual system. Thus the notion of domain plays a crucial role in the theory. However, domain is never defined, but taken for granted. By means of data from language acquisition and language production and comprehension I question the cognitive status of the notion of domain. Furthermore, I demonstrate that both linguistic and nonlinguistic evidence indicate that space and time are cognitively linked in a way that makes it problematic to claim that space is mapped onto time in the development of grammatical temporal markers.

In a recent NJL article (Enger 2013), Hans-Olav Enger argues against some analyses of gender and ‘pancake sentences’, in particular against Josefsson (2009). In this short contribution, I will discuss what I take to be misunderstandings in Enger (2013). In addition I will discuss some data not included in Enger's (2013) analysis, which I will show to be crucial for the comparison between the different analyses proposed.

The Danish prosodic phenomenon stød is associated with a specific range of suffixes including the singular definite suffixes -en and -et. Diachronically, as well as distributionally, stød is related to Swedish/Norwegian accent 1, but unlike accent 1, stød is seen as phonetically and phonologically marked. Keeping in mind the cross-distribution between phonetic/phonological markedness and distributional patterns, we investigate here whether stød is also related to accent 1 when it comes to cognitive markedness. We present the results of a psycholinguistic study in which participants attended to words that were either appropriate combinations of prosody (stød vs. non-stød) and suffix (singular definite -en/-et vs. plural indefinite -e) or mismatches between prosody and suffix. Participants gave slower and more inaccurate responses to mismatches. This effect of mismatch was most pronounced for words with non-stød stems, indicating that the cognitive markedness status of stød corresponds to that of accent 2.

This study analyses the relationship between four near-synonymous Swedish prepositions, namely angående, beträffande, gällande and rörande, which are used to establish what we call a topic-marking relation, as in statens avtal angående finansieringen ‘the agreement of the state regarding the financing’. By focusing on a single, loosely defined genre consisting of the written texts included in the Swedish PAROLE corpus, we address the question of what differences there are among these four prepositions, which intuitively seem highly similar and mutually interchangeable. In order to find out which contextual and grammatical factors might influence the choice of one preposition over the others, two complementary analyses were performed. First, a so-called collostructional analysis (see Stefanowitsch & Gries 2003, Gries & Stefanowitsch 2004) was performed on 791 cases of these prepositions found in the PAROLE corpus. Secondly, the corpus examples were annotated according to ten syntactic and four semantic criteria and a multinomial logistic regression analysis was performed on the annotated data set. The results show some tendencies pointing to differing usage patterns of the four prepositions. Beträffande stands out as the most frequent of them all and is also preferably used when no explicit head element is present, typically in sentence-initial position. Angående prefers words of communication while rörande is used when another topic-marking preposition is also present. On the other hand, neither of the two analyses leads to a clear distinction among the four prepositions, thus pointing to the fact that these topic-marking prepositions indeed constitute a fairly good case of adpositional synonymy, with few distinguishing factors separating one from the other.

This article investigates the meaning and use of singular indefinite determiners in Swedish, in particular the way in which the existential determiner någon/något contrasts with the indefinite article en/ett in different contexts. The problem is approached from three different perspectives, the first being a contrastive Scandinavian perspective, where the Swedish data are reviewed in the light of contrastive data from the closely related languages Danish and Norwegian. Secondly, corpus data are used to substantiate the results of the contrastive analysis both quantitatively and qualitatively. The last section adopts a more theoretical perspective and tries to present a formal semantic analysis of the two determiners under study, drawing on typological work on indefinites and studies of the historical development of indefinite determiners.

The present paper deals with the study of repair patterns. Repair, seen as some type of intrinsic trouble manifested by some party during interaction, has here been studied in an institutional setting, the second-language class-room. The repair sequences have been studied relative to the activity type in which the participants are involved. The results show the following: first, that the activity type has an impact on the repair pattern; and secondly, both quantitative and qualitative differences in repair patterns are found when compared with non-educational and foreign-language-teaching settings.

Through in-depth analysis of the use of det ‘it, that’ and så ‘then’ occupying the first clausal position (the prefield) in Danish talk-in-interaction, this paper investigates how speakers use highly flexible linguistic elements to their advantage when commencing clauses in real time. These particular words are useful when occupying the prefield, because their flexible nature means that they can be used even when speakers do not have a full format ready for the carrier clause, as long as they have some idea of the interactional purpose of the clause and its information structural prerequisites. The dominating frequency of the most frequent clause openers goes largely unmentioned in previous accounts of the prefield, and the use of det ‘it, that’ and så ‘then’ challenges the popular notion that the textually unmarked prefield is also the grammatical subject of the carrier clause.

In this paper, we show that Icelandic uses the phonetic parameters of speaking rate, duration and voice quality (VQ) to distinguish between information-seeking questions (ISQs) and rhetorical questions (RQs). Specifically, durations are longer (speaking rate is slower) and nonmodal VQs are used more in RQs than in ISQs. Our findings for temporal parameters fit in with previous studies on the prosody of RQs in various languages. With respect to VQ, Icelandic differs, for example, from German and English in the location of breathy voice in the utterance (utterance-initial in German and English, utterance-final in Icelandic). We interpret the utterance-final position of breathiness in Icelandic RQs as a potential compensating strategy for the lack of phonological cues, i.e. boundary tones.

This article discusses the existence of transitive expletive constructions (TECs) in Swedish. It is often claimed that TECs are a distinctive feature of Insular Scandinavian, but do not exist in Mainland Scandinavian. In this article, however, it is shown that such constructions do occur throughout the history of Swedish and, to some extent, still occur in present-day Swedish, although nowadays the language has none of the features previously proposed as licensing TECs. It is also shown that Swedish has a broader repertoire of associate subjects in TECs than does Icelandic. Unlike in Icelandic, associate subjects can also be definite in Swedish. The presence of TECs in Swedish calls into question the previous analysis of the licensing of this construction, and in this article a new explanation for the phenomenon is proposed. It is claimed that TECs are possible if the expletive can merge in a position structurally higher than the canonical subject position. In the case of V2 languages, this implies that expletives must be able to merge in Spec,CP, and it is shown that in Swedish they are able to merge in this position.

Situated in Southeast Asia, Singapore’s sociolinguistic situation has undergone several changes due to active language planning policies, with English and Mandarin becoming the two socio-politically majority languages in Singapore society. Over time, this has led to the restricted usage of various non-Mandarin dialects, including Teochew, both in public settings and within the home. This paper examines how Teochew, a heritage language in Singapore, has been affected in its vocabulary usage in apparent time. The data was collected from 41 Teochew male and female speakers aged 12–86 years. This paper contributes theoretically by showing the properties of a heritage language, Singapore Teochew, in an environment with multiple shifts of several major languages in Southeast Asia, instead of the more common situation of one major language shift.

The purpose of this article is to give a description of the syntax of clausal complementation in Norwegian within the framework of Lexical-Functional Grammar (LFG). The data are mostly authentic sentences from text corpora and web pages. The description given is rather different from traditional descriptions. An important point to be made is that Norwegian (finite and non-finite) clausal complements are not homogeneous with respect to their syntactic properties. Even if most clausal complements behave like objects, Norwegian also has clausal complements that do not behave like objects. This phenomenon is well known from other languages, but has never been observed in the literature on Norwegian. The structure and function of non-object clausal complements are discussed, and the traditional idea that they are PP obliques is rejected.

This article deals with the marking of grammatical relations in Tariana, North-Arawakan, and how this marking interrelates with topicality, definiteness and other discourse characteristics of nominal constituents. The following four case-marking systems are distinguished in Tariana: (i) a subject vs object case system, used with personal pronouns with animate reference; (ii) a case system characterized by an enclitic -nuku for marking topicalized and referential non-subjects, used with all types of nominal constituents; (iii) an ergative case-marking used with all types of nominal constituents under emphasis in A function, the ergative case marker being the same as instrumental; (iv) a system of peripheral cases – locative and instrumental, used with all types of nominal constituents, but obligatory only with pronouns. The overt case-marking in Tariana is related to such parameters as topicality, definiteness and emphasis, and consequently is dependent on the structure of discourse. I will argue that the unusual case-marking patterns in Tariana corroborate cross-linguistic generalizations on a dependency between case-marking and topical properties of NPs in languages with an opposition between marked and unmarked case forms.

It is well-known that grammatical movement is somehow linked to functional heads. There is less agreement on the excact nature of this correlation. According to one view, phrases are moved to the specifier positions of functional heads because functional heads attract them. According to another view, movement is not triggered by functional heads alone, but depends on the larger grammatical context. For instance, one such proposal says that T (tense) becomes attractive only when selected by finite C (complementizer), while V becomes attractive when selected by v* (transitivizer). What attracts phrases are therefore the C–T system and the v*–V system as a whole, not the individual functional heads; moved phrases are then sandwitched between the two heads. In this article, we present evidence in favor of this view by looking at first language acquisition. The data shows that in child Finnish, subject determiner phrases (DPs) move into the position of grammatical subject if and only if the full complementizer system has matured. Movement to the (Spec, TP) subject position therefore depends on the presence of C.

This article is a review of Thorstein Fretheim (ed.), Sentrale problemer i norsk syntaks, Universitetsforlaget 1997. The review groups together the papers by Even Hovdhaugen, Jan Engh and Thorstein Fretheim. It argues that these three papers largely fail to support the authors' claims because post-Aspects developments in transformational, generrative grammer are ignored. Also, specific analyses based on TG are proposed as alternatives to some analyses based on analogy. Finally, lars Hellan's contribution is examined in a rather detailed manner, and some counterproposals are sketched.

This paper proposes a treatment of optional prepositional phrases with a status intermediate between adjuncts and complements. The essential idea is simply that such PPs are semantically but not syntactically selected. It is argued that prepositions often assign an external theta role to a complement of the governing verb, subject to the heretofore unnoticed syntactic condition that such external arguments must be direct rather than oblique. This explains certain binding opacity effects and also greatly simplifies the subcategorization frames of verbs. The analysis is formulated in the framework of Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (Pollard & Sag 1994).

In this paper, self-recorded interactions from two studies of verbal interaction in Denmark are analysed using key concepts from Erving Goffman's frame analysis and Don Zimmerman's theory of identities in talk. It is documented how the recorder is integrated into everyday interaction as soon as the informant in his or her capacity as temporary fieldworker has explained the reason for its being there and has obtained the permission from his or her partners to record them. In several excerpts ascribed identities and using the recorder as an addressee are used to create amusement and to exploit the possibilities for supplying the innocent overhearing researcher with new and shocking information. The question of language norms during recorded sessions was raised in conversations in both studies and the limits of privacy were brought up.

Finnish word order is relatively free, making room for all mathematically possible word orders in many constructions. Because there is no evidence in this language for radical nonconfigurationality, explanations must be sought from syntax. It is argued in this article that morphosyntax and word order represent syntactic structure at the PF-interface. Rich morphosyntax frees word order, poor morphosyntax freezes it. The hypothesis is formalized within the context of a parsing-oriented theory of the human language faculty (UG) combining left-to-right minimalism with the dynamic syntax approach. The analysis was implemented as an algorithm and successfully tested with a corpus of 119,800 unique Finnish word orders.