This paper explores ‘the evaluative noget construction’ in Danish. The construction consists of noget ‘something’ juxtaposed by a noun in an evaluative frame such as e.g. Det er noget pjat, ‘It’s nonsense’. With a starting point in cross-linguistic studies on something, the paper moves on to explore core members of this evaluative class in Danish, providing a detailed semantic analysis of the construction’s core configurations. The affordance of noget ‘something’ to mean ‘something bad’ is a key to understanding the construction, and from this general premise the class of evaluatives take off in multiple negative directions, providing a snapshot of the Danish linguaculture of evaluation. The paper argues for a Cultural Construction Grammar that can bring together the lexicogrammatical integrationism of construction grammar approaches with the linguacultural holism of the research in ethnosyntax. The goal is to provide high-definition analysis of complex, language-specific constructions in a simple, globally translatable metalanguage.

This article examines evidentiality in the frame of inferential adverbs in written interaction from the perspective of Finnish, a language that does not have evidentiality as a grammatical category. The analysis focuses on six adverbs, such as käsittääkseni ‘as far as I understand’ and tietääkseni ‘to my knowledge, as far as I know’. Evidentiality and epistemic modality intertwine in their semantics, as these adverbs represent a writer’s access to information, but also indicate her evaluation of its reliability. First, this article offers a description of the interactional functions of these adverbs such as marking a writer’s opinion in contrasts, expressing slight hedging in order to anticipate corrections, to allow space for other opinions, or to create irony. Second, in the framework of cognitive grammar, the analysis focuses on the meaning of the evidential verb+kseni construction and the effect of different verb stems on it. These adverbs share similar functions in texts, which is due to their flexible constructional meaning. While varying from lexeme to lexeme, specific evidential and epistemic dimensions can either be foregrounded and relevant in a situation or remain backgrounded and not activated.

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.

This special issue of the Nordic Journal of Linguistics is devoted to receptive multilingualism (RM), and includes papers presented in the conference Receptive Multilingualism: Multilingual Resources in the Service of Mutual Understanding, held at the University of Eastern Finland, Joensuu, in 2015. RM refers to a language contact situation in which hearers’ or readers’ understanding of a non-native language is based on their skills in either their first language or languages that they have learned later in life. In such situations comprehension can be based on linguistic similarity of the languages, on acquired knowledge of the languages, or both. A particular characteristic of RM is its emphasis on receptive language skills: the hearer or the reader does not necessarily actively command the language they are able to understand. In its most interactive form RM refers to a situation in which every conversation participant can use their native language and be understood by the others.

This study investigates how givenness and pronominality affect the dative alternation in Norwegian. Previous studies have found givenness to influence the Double Object Dative (DOD) but not the Prepositional Dative (PD). Thirty-one Norwegian native speakers completed a speeded acceptability judgment task, in which given objects were expressed by definite DPs or pronouns, and either preceded or followed the new referent. DODs were found to be highly sensitive to givenness. Surprisingly, PDs also showed contextual dependency. Referring expressions affected the two structures differently: reaction times were faster with pronouns in DODs and slower in PDs. This suggests that the alternates have different processing biases, with the former preferring pronouns and the latter DPs. The results are further considered in relation to the notion of harmonic alignment, as PDs, in which the typically animate recipient is always the second object, and will thus consistently represent a suboptimal and non-harmonious order when givenness is adhered to.

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).

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).

Danish motion verbs provide a good candidate for testing the hypothesis of semantic determination on Danish, a hypothesis most recently discussed by Levin (1993) in her description of English verb classes and alternations. A set of core meaning components for motion verbs is identified and a taxonomy of Danish motion verbs is produced. With the basic assumption that a word's meaning determines its syntactic potential, this paper gives an account of the syntactic alternations that Danish motion verbs can undergo, and exposes a more or less transparent relation between their syntax and semantics.

In modern Icelandic, spoken in the South, West, and North-West of Iceland, there is a phonemic opposition between voiced and voiceless nasals before stop consonants. For the present investigation the research instrument was the velograph. The purpose of the research was to investigate patterns of velar movement associated with each type of nasal consonants. The results show different types of velar movement organized according to two separate temporal patterns. For the voiceless nasals the movement of the velum is more rapid and begins earlier than for the voiced nasals. There are also significant differences in the nasalization of the preceding vowel according to whether the following nasal consonant is voiced or voiceless.

This paper presents a diachronic account for the emergence of the expletive það in Icelandic impersonal constructions. Using data from the IcePaHC corpus (Wallenberg et al. 2011), I show that a cataphorically referential það functions as a topic position placeholder in Old Icelandic (1150-1350) in impersonals with a clausal argument. The corpus findings indicate that það spread from this early cataphoric context to impersonals which lack the clausal argument, with ‘say-type predicates’ acting as a bridging context. Strikingly, this coincides with another change whereby cataphoric það becomes increasingly restricted to the topic position in constructions with a clausal subject. I interpret this as evidence that cataphoric það is losing its subject status in such contexts and becoming a topic position placeholder, in line with its function in impersonals. This sheds light on the mixed status of cataphoric það in modern Icelandic and challenges the ‘Prefinite First Hypothesis’ for the diachrony of Germanic expletives (e.g. Faarlund 1990).

This paper reports on field work conducted during 1994 in Västra Nyland (Finland) in order to obtain independent and current documentation of the incongruent case forms in the dialect, as reported by Lundström (1939). The data collected substantiated the existence of incongruent case forms in the dialect, but the actual use of such forms could not be traced any longer. Due to this, several details in the actual use of certain incongruency types could not be clarified. The loss of case incongruency in this dialect area raises the question of how a vernacular can change such a grammatical feature. According to Emonds (1986), such losses cannot be remedied, but this is exactly the case here. The changing status of a modern Scandinavian dialect seems to be the only way to explain this change.

Taking a self-determination perspective, the present study aims at assessing how the linguistic background shapes internal and external motivation towards Finnish among young Swedish-speaking Finns. Self-report questionnaire data were collected in 2014 among students in Swedish language secondary schools in Esbo/Espoo and Raseborg/Raasepori in Finland (N = 233). The results demonstrated that bilinguals are more internally motivated towards Finnish, whereas Swedish speakers are more externally motivated towards Finnish. Furthermore, while Swedish speakers in both Swedish-dominated and Finnish-dominated localities reported the same level of external motivation, bilinguals in the Swedish-dominated locality reported higher level of external motivation than did bilinguals in the Finnish-dominated locality. These findings and their theoretical implications are discussed.

Bound neuter i-stems in Modern Icelandic, which occur as heads of compounds in for example salanguryroi ‘slang word’, support an overgenerating model of the lexicon. Bound stems are shown to be generated as constituents at level 1 of the lexicon and combined to form compounds at level 2. Bound stems are blocked from becoming inputs to the syntax by the Avoid Synonymy principle (Kiparsky 1983), revised as a constraint on the output of the lexicon as a whole. Because Avoid Synonymy operates in lexical Logical Form, it has access to word-internal structure at each lexical level. The revised version of Avoid Synonymy is given additional support from Icelandic and English.

Sounds spoken on the inbreath have been shown to be common in the world’s languages, and in the Nordic languages ingressive speech seems to be especially frequent. The present study focuses on Finnish and Danish response particles spoken on the inbreath, by examining their uses in everyday talk-in-interaction in corpora of recorded interactions. The particles we examine and their non-ingressive counterparts can perform confirming and acknowledging actions. We analyze the particles as receipts to answers to questions, as responses to questions, as responses to assessments, and as responses to affiliation-seeking utterances. In these positions, the ingressive particles turn out to index that the content of the previous turn was already sufficiently established and, consequently, that there is nothing to add. In cases where an engaged response is called for, the particles are shown to have a disaffiliative potential.