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.

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.

The Estonian indefinite pronouns keegi ‘someone’ and miski ‘something’ are distinguished by being able to refer to animate or inanimate entities, respectively. However, in certain Estonian dialects, keegi is used to refer to inanimate entities as well. The aim of this paper is to describe the functions and use of keegi based on the data in the Corpus of Estonian Dialects. We used statistical analyses to determine which dialects typically use keegi to refer to inanimate entities and which variables (polarity, function, position in the clause, case marking) contribute most to this variation. The results show that there are significant differences between the dialects: keegi is mostly used to refer to inanimate entities in the northern dialects (most frequently in the Western, Mid, and Eastern dialects), but this phenomenon is rare or non-existent in the southern dialects. All of the variables studied contribute to this variation: keegi is most likely to refer to an inanimate being when it is in the partitive case, functions as an object, a partitive subject, or a negative polarity item, and is positioned at the end of a negative clause.

The machine translation project Eurotra is described as a multilanguage modular translation system with 9 monolingual analysis modules, 72 bilingual transfer modules, and 9 monolingual synthesis modules. The analysis module for Danish is described as a three-step parser with structure generation rules for immediate constituent structure, syntactic structure, and semantic structure, and translation rules between them. The topological grammatical description of Danish proposed by Paul Diderichsen, is shown to be useful in building the parser for Danish, especially with respect to the interaction between empty slots and filled slot in the topological pattern. Lastly, the special problem with parsing and disambiguation of sentences that allow many pp attachments patterns is mentioned and a solution is suggested.

The Scandinavian languages are very closely related but also vary syntactically in interesting ways, making this family useful in the study of typology variation. In this paper the issue of non-local reflexives, or ‘long-distance reflexives’ (LDR) is investigated. New LDR data from the Scandinavian languages is presented to show that the Binding Conditions cannot account for the variation in LDR in these languages, since the range of domains that LDR may or may not occur in in each variety varies non-hierarchically. For instance, LDR in Icelandic may be bound out of a finite complement clause but not out of a relative clause, while the reverse is true in most Norwegian dialects. Faroese allows LDR out of both clause types, but many dialects do not allow a second person pronoun to co-occur in a sentence containing LDR, which does not generally affect Icelandic or Norwegian LDR. An extension of Dalrymple's (1993) typology of anaphora, which is set within the framework of Lexical-Functional Grammar, can account for this data, using a combination of inside-out and outside-in functional uncertainty equations, on- and off-path constraints and positive and negative constraints, all of which refer to elements (potentially) found in functional-structure.

The focus of my analysis is the so-called existential construction. The languages examined are English, Swedish and Icelandic. The present article assumes the perspective of Ronald W. Langacker's cognitive grammar as the theoretical background. First of all, the assumption is that the unstressed, initial pronoun there, or its Scandinavian equivalents, are semantically definable as abstract-setting subjects of their respective sentences, with, possibly, the exception of Icelandic það. Secondly, the conceptualization of the existential scenes in the three languages is a dynamic process in each case. The dynamicity of the semantics of existential scenes is the result of assuming two planes, the actual and a virtual one, and establishing correspondences between them. The actual plane reflects our direct apprehension of reality. A virtual plane consists in the dynamic re-assignment of roles to the actual elements introduced by means of the virtual abstract-setting subject.

This article examines the Finnish tail construction (right dislocation) used as a first mention of a referent and the variation of the demonstrative pronouns tämä ‘this’, tuo ‘that’, and se ‘it’ in the construction. Many previous studies have suggested that tail construction (TC) referents are highly active and thus already mentioned and salient in a conversation. However, in Finnish, the TC may introduce new referents into a conversation, and this article provides an empirical analysis of how and why this is done. First-mention TCs are often evaluations or questions in which the proposition links the utterance to the preceding context. When presenting new information, the TC allows the speaker to present a potentially lengthy lexical definition of a new referent at the end of the utterance, avoiding the additional emphatic meanings or unwanted implications a simply inverted word order might create.

An interesting restriction on Norwegian identity-of-sense anaphoric reference when the anaphor occurs as second object is discussed. Fretheim (1974) proposed to account for this by a global rule constraining pronominalization in such contexts, and claimed that the necessity of this constraint renders any interpretive account of identity-of-sense anaphoric reference untenable. The present paper purports to demonstrate the contrary, that Fretheim's observations in fact provide support for an interpretive theory of identify-of-sense anaphora as far as Norwegian is concerned.

This paper presents a detailed analysis of the behavior of the Icelandic conjunction enda. It turns out to be possible to explain all the puzzling facts about this conjunction by reinterpreting the traditional division between coordination and subordination by breaking it up into two binary features, [±CO] and [±SUB]. Furthermore, it is argued that this approach gives support for the analysis of Icelandic sentence structure proposed in Rögnvaldsson (1984) and elaborated in Thráinsson (1984, 1986).

English some and Swedish någon have a number of ‘subidentificational’ meanings, as in English some general (or other) has been shot; it was some shooting (or something). This paper reviews those meanings and attempts to determine how many context-invariant meanings are needed in order to account for their full range of meanings in context. By explicitly setting out processes of inference generation within a Gricean framework, it is found that for a large number, only one underlying (i.e. coded) meaning is required, which in context generates inferences such as lack of speaker knowledge, recall or interest in the NP referent, regarding either its type or which entity it is. Nevertheless, not all meanings can be handled in this way and additional coded meanings are required. Two diachronic pathways are discussed via which one coded meaning might extend to another. Some conclusions relevant for future work on indefinites are drawn.

It has been reported that speakers of Danish understand more Swedish than vice versa. One reason for this asymmetry might be that spoken Swedish is closer to written Danish than vice versa. We hypothesise that literate speakers of Danish use their orthographic knowledge of Danish to decode spoken Swedish. To test this hypothesis, first-language (L1) Danish speakers were confronted with spoken Swedish in a translation task. Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were elicited to study the online brain responses during decoding operations. Results showed that ERPs to words whose Swedish pronunciation was inconsistent with the Danish spelling were significantly more negative-going than ERPs to words whose Swedish pronunciation was consistent with the Danish spelling between 750 ms and 900 ms after stimulus onset. Together with higher word-recognition scores for consistent items, our data provide strong evidence that online activation of L1 orthography enhances word recognition of spoken Swedish in literate speakers of Danish.

The paper investigates the use of PPs, specifically prepositions and the case marking on their DP arguments, in moribund North American (heritage) Icelandic (NAmIce), using data from a map task experiment. Since prepositional phrases combine semantic properties with morpho-syntactic properties, PPs allow us to investigate the relative vulnerability of both domains at once. Our results show that while the prepositional inventory of NAmIce is not reduced as compared to Modern Icelandic, the choice of prepositions is subject to crosslinguistic influence from the dominant language English. For case, we find an increase in the use of nominative and accusative case at the expense of the dative; prepositions may take over case functions too. Our results are in line with previous research on case in heritage languages as well as studies on language change, while partially contradicting the assumption that loss is reversely related to acquisition.

The Icelandic palatalisation of velar plosives has been used in several recent studies as evidence in the continuing search for an adequate model of phonology. Limitations of the naturalness of the rule in the modern language have led to suggestions that it is no longer a phonological but rather a morphonological process. The present paper reviews in some detail the status of the rule against a background of other phonological and morphological regularities in Modern Icelandic. It is concluded that while not every instance of a palatal consonant must necessarily be derived from an underlying velar, the evidence for the rule is overwhelming. The separation of phonological and morphonological rules is critically examined in the light of the Icelandic data and rejected; its untenability is further strengthened by the history of the rule. It is argued that while mechanical phonetic tendencies play a role in the rise of innovations, their entrenchment in the phonology of a language is not bound by such considerations. In effect phonological rules must always be to a greater or lesser extent unnatural.