This paper deals with the SIMPLE-DK lexicon, a computational lexicon for Danish developed at the Centre for Language Technology in Copenhagen within the European Union project SIMPLE. The general SIMPLE model, on which the Danish lexicon is based, is presented, and the way in which several specific aspects of Danish, such as nominal compounds and time expressions, are accommodated in this model is then described. Phrasal verbs – in particular phrasal motion verbs – are shown to be a challenging phenomenon since they are difficult to place in the SIMPLE event ontology, and pose problems regarding the interpretation of the directional particle they combine with. The encoding strategy that is proposed here accounts for compositional and non-compositional types of phrasal verb, and captures the relation between act-denoting and transition-denoting senses of the same verb in terms of regular polysemy. The final part of the paper deals with the exploitation of SIMPLE-DK as an ontological and lexical source in the Danish project on content-based querying OntoQuery. In the OntoQuery ontology, the structured concepts in SIMPLE-DK are combined with nutrition concepts, and the resulting ontology is used for matching evaluation. It is also discussed how selectional restrictions and qualia roles from SIMPLE-DK can be included in a conceptual grammar to be used for query and text analysis.

This paper reports work in progress. It concerns the relationship in Germanic languages between the sentence initial constituent XP, and the rest of the sentence S, assuming a rule S → XP S. An informal proposal is presented, according to which that relationship is better characterized in terms of the notion of unification than that of predication. The author is currently working with Elisabet Engdahl on producing a precise grammar of some long distance dependency constructions which should be able to embody the ideas sketched here.

Taggin is the proces of assigning morphological, sytactic and /or semantic information to linguistic units in a text. The most important problems in connection with tagging are, of course, those related to subject matter, but in computerized tagging systems, which this article is about, there are also several technical problems. They automatically announce thermselves, and have to be solved one way or the other. In this paper a fairly extensive description of a computer system (THE TAGGER) is given, which is an attempt to solve some of the problems diswcussed. This article is non-technical in the sense that it presupposes no actual Knowledge of programming, but some general experience of computers and computational linguistics is of course helpful.

This article deals with the basic issues of the nature of linguistic meaning and the place of semantics in linguistic theory. First, there is a discussion of the implications for semantics of the research paradigm based on formal simulation, concluding that it involves a risk of misrepresenting the place of semantics in linguistics. Second, there is a discussion of the truth-conditional approach, which, although in one important respect it involves a more adequate conception of the role of semantics in language theory, is seen as misrepresenting linguistic meaning in a way that has been pointed out within the cognitive approach to semantics. Third, however, it is argued that the cognitive approach does not sufficiently account for the external anchoring of meaning. Fourth, it is argued that meaning ‘outside the head’ must be understood as basically interactive. A crucial element in the view argued here is the distinction between linguistic, potential meaning, which functions as instructions to the addressee, and actual meaning or ‘message’, which the addressee works out as part of the actual process of interpretation. Within such a picture, the importance of both cognition and truth can be accounted for, and both aspects are seen as dependent on the fundamental embeddedness of language in a shared social universe.

As pointed out by numerous researchers, only a limited degree of correspondence exists between Polish and Swedish concerning the use of tense and aspect. The discrepancies lead to several typical interference phenomena in Polish speakers learning Swedish. This article contains a contrastive analysis of forms and functions of tense and aspect in Polish and Swedish, where the main sources of interference phenomena are pointed out.

Neurolinguistics, the study of language representations and processes in the human brain, is at the crossroads of fields of science such as linguistics, psychology, neuropsychology, and neurology. The present survey starts with a historical outline and continues with a review of recent studies on mental lexicon and syntax in aphasia. Those studies support the psychological reality of certain linguistic distinctions. We finish by mentioning some future trends in neurolinguistics.

This paper presents a usage-based cognitive approach to the different rates at which Icelandic masculine forms in nominative/accusative plural -ur are reanalysed as feminine. Of the 14.92% of nouns in plural -ur, 91.89% are feminine, others masculine. Syncretism in nominative/accusative plural is exceptionless among feminines, but relatively rare among masculines. Interestingly, plurals such as masculine eigendur ‘owners’, fætur ‘feet’, vetur ‘winters’ occasionally yield the feminine outputs definite eigendur-nar, fætur-nar, vetur-nar, and are sometimes modified by feminine forms of adjectives and determiners. As the full set of forms in plural -ur is highly schematic, we might expect reanalysis – viewed as a property of a schema’s productivity – to correlate proportionately with the frequency of corresponding masculine forms. However, corpus data for Icelandic betray a mismatch. Through a network model approach that emphasises prototype structure, minimal schematicity is shown to impact the rate of reanalysis by means of a gang effect.

Decades of research on bilingual grammars corroborate the integrated nature of these systems, leading to the conjecture that these representations are ‘shared’ (Marian & Spivey 2003, Kroll & Gollan 2014, Putnam et al. 2018). A specific population of bilinguals, namely heritage language speakers, shows a tendency for highly variable allomorphy (Polinsky 2018, Putnam et al. 2021); however, with this aspect of grammar that is often in a state of flux, there are instances of stability. Here we thoroughly investigate the stability of tense allomorphy of in North American Norwegian (NAmNo), a moribund heritage language spoken in the Upper Midwestern United States. Formally, we build upon initial observations provided by Lykke (2020), showing how a late-insertion approach to the syntax–phonological interface in combination with events, features, and precedence (EFP) phonology (Raimy 2000, Papillon 2020, Idsardi 2022) provides a straightforward account of the structural complexities that determine exponency in bilingual grammars.

In Norwegian, the verb få ‘get, receive’ differs from all other verbs with respect to its use in imperative sentences and with respect to control properties in infinitival clauses. In the imperative, the deleted subject may be first person, and in clauses embedded after ‘ask’, få has unambiguous subject control. These syntactic facts are related to the lexical semantic properties of the verb få, and it is shown that this syntactic behavior is not due to some idiosyncratic peculiarity of this particular verb. The semantic properties of this and other Norwegian verbs account for the uniqueness of få in this respect.

There are basically three ways in which the reference of a token of the English proximal spatial indexical here and corresponding terms in other languages can be resolved in the context-dependent, pragmatic phase of the addressee's determination of the propositional content of an utterance that contains this adverbial adjunct. ‘Here’ may refer reflexively to the place of utterance, including minimally the spot occupied by the speaker (token-reflexive reference), it may be anaphoric upon a discourse antecedent that provides information necessary for identification of the referent (anaphoric reference), or resolution of the reference depends on information derived from processing of a perceptual stimulus (deictic reference). These three pragmatic paths to resolution of the reference of proximal spatial indexicals are not mutually exclusive, so they do not warrant postulation of lexical ambiguity, at least not the traditional kind of ambiguity based on differences in conceptual meaning.

This paper critically reviews S. J. Keyser and Paul Kiparsky's “Syllable Structure in Finnish Phonology” (1984). We also treat Finnish morphophonemics using a CV-tier analysis, but account for forms that their method fails on. We posit six stem types in the verbal lexicon and derive the forms of all inflections of all types with just twelve morphophonemic rules. After the stems are modified and suffixes (and person/number endings) are attached, a single, general, phonological rule of Consonant Gradation applies postlexically. To develop a general theory from our analysis, we consider restrictions on rules which may alter stems: lexical rules apply to stems before affixation and only to the final segments of stems; only post-lexical phonological rules apply to affixes. We eliminate all morphological conditions on individual rules and extrinsic ordering conditions.

In this paper, I will present an empirical study on the use of the temporal adverbs nú and núna ‘now’ in Icelandic talk-in-interaction. The aim is to investigate whether the two words have different functions, and, if so, to describe these differences. As I will show, nú and núna show clear differences in respect to their syntactical distribution. Furthermore, I will argue, that the syntactic distribution also reflects differences on the functional level. While núna occurs in the end field and has a clear referential function, nú tends to occur in the front field and have closer ties to the finite verb. The theoretical and methodological framework for the study is interactional linguistics, and the data comprises my transcription of around fourteen hours of conversation.

This article focuses on the methodological challenges involved in investigating anaphoric binding in Norwegian as a second language. Norwegian anaphors can be bound both locally and non-locally, and since anaphors vary cross-linguistically, it is interesting to explore whether and where L2 speakers of Norwegian allow such target-like local and non-local binding in their L2. Sentences with two possible antecedents might be ambiguous for L2 speakers, and the truth-value judgment task is generally considered to be the best method for eliciting knowledge of L2 speakers' intuitions of anaphoric binding in ambiguous sentences. In Norwegian, long-distance binding cannot cross a finite clause boundary, and the long-distance anaphor cannot be locally bound. Because of this, the truth-value judgment task is sometimes less adequate for testing all relevant binding structures in Norwegian. Dialectal variations in Norwegian pose additional challenges for the study of the acquisition of anaphors in an L2. This paper discusses the implications of these methodological challenges.

In this paper, I take a closer look at a set of observations concerning word order and co-occurrence restrictions on verb-particle constructions, benefactive double object constructions and resultative constructions in Norwegian. While a particle can co-occur with both a beneficiary DP and a resultative AP, beneficiary DPs and resultatives cannot co-occur at all. I give an analysis in terms of the system proposed in Ramchand (2006), where I argue that the co-occurrence restrictions follow from the syntactic structure assumed together with independent properties of adjectival resultative constructions and verb-particle constructions.

Following the spirit of Relativized Extreme Functionalism, I argue that a set of grammatical features, traditionally thought of as devoid of semantics, lexical class (declension and conjugation), in fact has semantic content. Taking Josefsson (1995. 1997. 1998) as a point of departure, I suggest that the lexical class determines the word class of a word, hence relating the word to a major ontological category such as THING and EVENT. A certain lexical class may correspond to a semantic subclass of a major ontological category, but this does not need to be the case. The approach taken explains certain morphological phenomena in Swedish, such as stem vowels, and explains why the non-head part of a compound is undetermined for major ontological category.