Previous studies have shown the productive nature of eye and how it enters into patterns of a more or less non-compositional nature (e.g. Sinclair 1991a, Więcławska 2012). This paper adds a contrastive dimension and explores the cross-linguistic phraseology of the English–Norwegian cognates eye and øye on the basis of monolingual, bilingual and multilingual corpora. Starting with a survey of uses in the bidirectional English–Norwegian Parallel Corpus+ (ENPC+), the contrastive analysis reveals that while the two languages overlap in many of their uses of eye/øye-expressions, differences also emerge, particularly with regard to the number of recurrent patterns recorded and their conditions of use. English has more recurrent patterns with eye, but Norwegian has by far the most frequent pattern, få øye på ‘catch sight of’ (lit.: get eye on). Following this general cross-linguistic survey, a focused contrastive case study of få øye på and its English correspondences shows how a combination of bilingual and monolingual corpora may complement each other in contrastive research. The study uncovers that English has three main correspondences – catch sight of, see and spot – of which the first is the one favoured by bilingual dictionaries. An in-depth analysis of få øye på and catch sight of and their extended context, i.e. when they are part of extended units of meaning (e.g. Sinclair 1996), suggests that although the two patterns are perfectly matched, there are substantial differences when it comes to their frequency of use. This contributes to the relatively low mutual correspondences in the bidirectional translation material at hand.

The paper touches upon the relations between grammar-oriented and communication-oriented ways of analysing language in the light of some recent related developments in theoretical linguistics, congnitive psychology and artificial intelligence. The integration of (linguistic) meaning, situational interpretation and background knowledge is discussed. In Particular, different types of linguistically relevant common-sense knowledge and higher level cognitive procedures are considered.

This paper presents possible evidence from Apachean English for the existence of state/nonstate and punctual/nonpunctual distinctions as theorized in Bickerton's bioprogram concept. In addition, it is pointed out that bioprogram characteristics may surface in contact situations other than classic creoles.

In Norway, there are between 10 and 15 bilingual or multilingual native speakers of Norwegian and Esperanto. This paper discusses some prosodic traits in the Esperanto spoken by one of them. The focus will be on compound stress. The speaker assigns primary stress to the penultimate syllable of words as in Standard Esperanto, including most compounds. Some of the Esperanto compounds, however, display first element primary stress, as in the Norwegian adstrate. In the current dataset, this is especially so for underived nouns. It is proposed that the Norwegian-like pattern is found in compound nouns that are formed spontaneously, while the Standard Esperanto pattern is found in lexicalised compounds, understood as prosodically simplex. For derived compounds in word classes other than nouns, the overall stress pattern is more like that of Standard Esperanto.

It is shown, on the basis of Swedish and French data, that expressions of distance may be raising predicates. Given a raising analysis, two interesting consequences follow: (a) One of two widely adopted hypotheses must be abandoned (the idea that an S with a filled Comp is never transparent to government, and the idea that French de and Swedish att, when introducing infinitival complements, are complementizers); (b) Raising predicates may be drawn from lexical categories other than V and A.

The topic of this paper is convergence in an asymmetrical bilingual setting, and it will be shown that the outcome of the convergence process is different in the dominant language (L1) from what it is in the receiving language (L2). In L1, there is complication of the receiving language, while there is reduction in the syntax of the L2.

This article deals with extensions of Vygotsky's (1978) theory of learning in the zone of proximal development. First, affect is added as an additional prerequisite Wertsch's (1979) extended version of it. Then, learning in the zone of proximal development is applied to communicative development. Finally, four main levels in the development from interindividual to intraindividual functioning of communication in the child are distinguished and exemplified.

In this study, we present an analysis of gender assignment tendencies in Jamtlandic, a language variety of Sweden, using a word list of 1029 items obtained from fieldwork. Most research on gender assignment in the Scandinavian languages focuses on the standard languages (Steinmetz 1985; Källström 1996; Trosterud 2001, 2006) and Norwegian dialects (Enger 2011, Kvinlaug 2011, Enger & Corbett 2012). However, gender assignment principles for Swedish dialects have not previously been researched. We find generalizations based on semantic, morphological, and phonological principles. Some of the principles apply more consistently than others, some ‘win’ in competition with other principles; a multinomial logistic regression analysis provides a statistical foundation for evaluating the principles. The strongest tendencies are those based on biological sex, plural inflection, derivational suffixes, and some phonological sequences. Weaker tendencies include non-core semantic tendencies and other phonological sequences. Gender assignment in modern loanwords differs from the overall material, with a larger proportion of nouns assigned masculine gender.

First of all we want to thank the general editors of the Nordic Journal of Linguistics for this opportunity to present to the readers of one of the most important linguistics journals in Northern Europe some specimens of sociolinguistic research. When we were approached by the general editors, we wholeheartedly agreed that this would be a good idea, although – or rather, precisely for this reason – sociolinguists in general have not been keen on publishing in NJL in the past. We have a modest hope that the present issue will change this.

Two models are presented of how the listener detects words in utterances. The first model assumes that the listener takes advantage of phonetic word boundary signals (WBSs), non-phonetic information not being necessary for word detection. The second model assumes that word detection relies on the use of non-phonetic knowledge of the language, words being detected through the recognition of the preceding word. Thus WBSs may not be necessary for word detection. The WBSs suggested for Finnish are evaluated against this background. The phonotactic WBSs are found unreliable or useless, the others limited in applicability or experimentally unsupported. The models and the results of the survey will direct future investigations of word detection and recognition in Finnish.

The purpose of this paper is to present an analysis of french schea deletion where, in agreemant with some basic principles of natural Generative Phonology, all rules are obligatory and not extrinsically ordered. This analysis is at variance with Dell's (1973) treatmant. It is contended that even if, as suggested by Rudes (1976), marking each phonological rule for applying only within a certain tempo can eliminate from the phonological component true optional rules, a certain amount of optionality must still be allowed within a rule. Furthermore, the nature of French schwa deletion forces us to reject rudes' model where the output of a tempo is the input to the next faster one.

This contribution focuses on Stroh-Wollin’s (2020 in NJL) etymologies of the Nordic definite articles enn and hinn and contrastive hinn/hitt. While I do not contest her central claim that Old Icelandic enn and Mainland Scandinavian hinn have separate historical origins, I do argue that her etymologies should not be accepted over more conventional ones already present in the literature. First, the etymology of enn should, along traditional lines, be connected to Germanic cognates such as Gothic jain-, German jen-, and English yon (rather than derived from an ancient PIE *eno-).1 Furthermore, contrastive hinn/hitt and definite hinn/hit should be considered a doublet, both ultimately deriving from a distal/contrastive element (rather than the article having separate origins in an innovated Proto-Nordic proximal demonstrative).

This article discusses definiteness marking in two possessive constructions that exhibit special patterns (split possession) for certain kinship nouns in Norwegian. It is shown that the special patterns, whereby the relevant nouns appear without a definite suffix, are retained by the majority speakers of American Norwegian (AmNo); some AmNo speakers use them even more extensively than homeland speakers, and only a minority do not use them. The forms without the suffix are analysed as a reflex of a poss feature that is a part of the featural make-up of certain kinship nouns (Julien 2005). I argue that the most conspicuous differences in distribution of this feature in the homeland vs. the heritage variety have emerged through a combination of decline in homeland Norwegian and retention and even extension in AmNo. The development in AmNo seems to be systematic and principled; it does not involve “loss” or incompleteness (e.g., Yager et al. 2015; Kupisch & Rothman 2016; Bayram et al. 2019).

The notion of symbolizability is taken as the second requisite of computation (the first being ‘algorithmizability’), and it is shown that symbols, qua symbols, are not symbolizable. This has far-reaching consequences for the computational study of language and for AI-research in language understanding. The representation hypothesis is formulated, and its various assumptions and goals are examined. A research strategy for the computational study of natural language understanding is outlined.

The present study is an analysis of phonologically deviant words in the speech of a group of Norwegin patients suffering from conduction aphasia. The analysis shows that these deviations are not randomly distributed. Their distribution is such that it supports phonological thories which posit hierarchiacal structures both below and above the level of the segment. The deviations can be accounted for within a phonological theory which assumes that a word's lexical phonological representation contains a phonemic level where each phoneme consists of a set of articulatory features which are hierarchically organized with respect to each other, and which also assumes that the phonological representation contains information about the syllable structure of the word.