This squib discusses the clitic DU (-du/-ðu/-tu) in Icelandic and compares it with other reduced forms of personal pronouns, such as ’ann (for hann ‘he’) and ’ún (for hún ‘she’). We show that there are various restrictions found on DU which are not found on other reduced forms of personal pronouns in Icelandic. We argue that whereas reduced forms such as ’ann and ’ún are morphophonologically conditioned, DU is syntactically conditioned; it is not only clause-bounded but also phase-bounded.

In this article it is demonstrated how verbal and non-verbal expressions, i.e. speech and gestures, interact to convey social and cognitive information in an excerpt taken from a conversational discussion. The theoretical framework for the article is that of information processing. Within this framework, verbal and non-verbal expressions in the conversation are characterized as discourse operations which develop and refine information in a generative search in analogy with an AI production system. The discourse operations function as underspecified instructions that in interaction with given information states generate new information states in search of a desired information state.

The paper is devoted to the thesis that all Sanskrit aspirates (voiceless as well: as voiced) should be represented as clusters of a consonantal segment /C/ plus a segment /h/, the latter being [-consonantal, -vocalic], and not as single consonantal segments with the feature [+aspirate], which is the usual analysis. The arguments for the correctness of this thesis are based on formal considerations, i.e. on the fact that a cluster analysis yields a simpler formul ation of a 1arge number of different phonological processes in the language. The paper compares the cluster analysis of aspirates with a non-cluster analysis with respect to ten different rules.

This is the first issue of volume 37 of the Nordic Journal of Linguistics. NJL is the journal of the Nordic Association of Linguists. Individuals may subscribe to the Journal by joining the Nordic Association of Linguists. The NAL membership form can be found on the Cambridge University Press web site of NJL, http://journals.cambridge.org/NJL, as well as on the NAL web site, http://www.uef.fi/nal.

Chinese noun classifiers are an obligatory category associated with nouns. Studies have shown that achieving a full understanding and good mastery of Chinese noun classifiers is difficult for both young and adult L2 learners. This study examines the learning strategies used by 30 Swedish adults for a period of two months. Their learning results are compared to 30 bilingual children's production of Chinese noun classifiers. The adult learners exhibit a normal top–down learning fashion, in which they fail to acquire the complex semantic and cognitive meanings embedded in the classifiers. The children, on the other hand, apply cognitive strategies with a bottom–up approach. The adults’ learning of classifiers lags surprisingly far behind their general level of Chinese proficiency. This study can be used as a reference for future studies on the conceptual and cognitive aspects of Chinese language acquisition by speakers whose native languages are not classifier languages.

The article discusses two types of discourse coherence, propositional coherence and interactional coherence. These two types are related to the mode of discourse as well as to the level of style in the discourse. It takes up the concept of frame as an organised subsystem of knowledge shared by human beings, and suggests ways in which this concept could be used in studies of coherence in everyday conversations, prose texts and lyrical poetry. The article also suggests a way of describing discourse coherence in terms of the discourse topic and considers the relationship of the two types in different kinds of texts.

The origins of prepositional phrase structure in Finnic languages shows little evidence of being contact-induced. However, whether language contact has influenced the structure at a later stage is debatable. The current paper provides new findings on the topic of contact-induced change by comparing the distribution of prepositions in Estonian dialects with the respective contact languages. The purpose is to determine whether the usage frequency of prepositions is higher in areas mainly in contact with prepositional Indo-European languages. The topic is approached from a corpus-based, frequency-driven viewpoint. The results show a small, gradual decrease in the use of prepositions from the northeastern to the western dialect areas. Thus, the uneven but regular distribution of prepositions in Estonian dialects cannot be explained with language contact. This evidence supports the general understanding that adpositions are an unlikely class to be influenced by contact.

A connectionist back-propagation net is trained to learn a mapping between verb forms (infinitive, imperative, present tense) and past tense forms. A back-propagation network requires that a one-to-one mapping exists between input and output. Since Swedish past tense is characterized by choice between weak and strong forms this proves a hard task for the net. Examples are: nypte/nöp ‘pinched’, tvang/tvingade ‘forced’, where there is no obvious reason for preferring one form over the other. The task is still worth doing since regularities emerge in the net over time. The performance of the connectionist model is analysed and compared to previous results.

The speech perception ability of people with hearing loss can be efficiently measured using phonemic-level scoring. We aimed to develop linguistic stimuli suitable for a closed-set phonemic discrimination test in the Swedish language called the Situated Phoneme (SiP) test. The SiP test stimuli that we developed consisted of real monosyllabic words with minimal phonemic contrast, realised by phonetically similar phones. The lexical and sublexical factors of word frequency, phonological neighbourhood density, phonotactic probability, and orthographic transparency were similar between all contrasting words. Each test word was recorded five times by two different speakers, including one male and one female. The accuracy of the test-word recordings was evaluated by 28 normal-hearing subjects in a listening experiment with a silent background using a closed-set design. With a few exceptions, all test words could be correctly discriminated. We discuss the results in terms of content- and construct-validity implications for the Swedish SiP test.

The present paper represents an attempt to explain the semantically deviant nature of causative constructions with present perfect effect sentences. As far as I known, such constructions have not been commented upon in the literature on causativity. I show that any counterfactual analysis of the traditional sort will bring them out as synthetic sentences, provided they are syntactically well-formed. On the other hand, if the notion os counterfactural dependence is re-interpreted along the lines of branching possible worlds, they can be shown to be systematically contradictory. I discuss the various revisions of the truth conditions for tensed formulae and of the general semantic framework which are necessary to accomplish this.

The article investigates the meeting between linguistics and literary theory under the auspices of cognitive grammar. First, it places this recent meeting in contrast to the relation between the two under structuralism; second, it sketches the philosophical foundations of cognitive linguistics in a series of related ideal types, such as cognitivism, diagrammatism, gestaltism, phenomenology, etc.; third, it investigates the literary theory of cognitive semantics in Lakoff and Turner's More Than Cool Reason as a background for some critical remarks.

This paper argues that pragmatic processes and syntactic constraints interact, that we can nevertheless retain the assumption that the natural language faculty is fully encapsulated, and that the problems posed by the phenomenon of gapping (bare argument ellipsis) can be resolved by analysing gapping as an instance of such interaction. A new model of language is sketched out, a model which is a formal reconstruction of assumptions about the language faculty and its relation to central cognitive processes made by Fodor. and Sperber and Wilson. A fragment is defined to cover pronominal anaphoric dependency and quantifier binding, and a new analysis of bare argument ellipsis (gapping) is presented.

The article deals with Stephen R. Anderson's Icelandic Vowel Shift Rule as an example of the general concept of exchange rule and involving marked vs. unmarked rule orde˚. The evidence adduced from Modern as well as Old Icelandic is reexamined in detail and shown to be in fact nonexistent. The paper ends with a few concluding remarks on the general notions involved.

It has long been recognised that at least some linguistic expressions —such as the connectives but in English and mais in French, and the particles doch in German and jo in Norwegian— function to affect the audience’s inference or reasoning processes rather than, or in addition to, provide conceptual content. There is a debate, however, whether the inference procedures triggered by these linguistic expressions function primarily to affect the audience’s recognition of the communicator’s arguments or primarily to guide the audience’s comprehension process. I discuss this question with reference to an instructive example from an advertisement in Norwegian. The advertisement is an argumentative text where the modal particle jo achieves subtle argumentational and stylistic effects that differ from those achieved by the corresponding German modal particles doch or ja. I demonstrate how the procedural semantic analyses independently developed by Berthelin & Borthen (submitted) of jo and Unger (2016a, 2016b, 2016c) of ja and doch support a pragmatic-semantic account of the argumentational effects of these particles. Although the semantics I propose for the respective particles does not directly relate to argumentation, it is specific enough to affect argumentation in predictable ways. The reason for this is that comprehension procedures and argumentation procedures closely interact in processing ostensive stimuli (such as verbal utterances) for optimal relevance.

In this paper, we argue for a view of case marking that does not treat case as the passive realisation of other morpho-syntactic properties of a construction but as independently bringing information to a clause. This different view of case entails that precise functions of case-marked expressions may be determined by the interaction of the case marking, the meaning of the host noun, the semantics of any predicate of which it is an argument and other contextually given factors. With respect to Estonian, it is argued that there is only one ‘structural’ case, the genitive, and this case marks non-subject, or oblique, dependency on some head. The partitive case, we argue, is semantically partitive in all its uses, except that the partitive meaning can be obscured or even eliminated depending on contextual factors. The nominative is merely the absence of case, associated with no specific positions or semantic effects.