This article approaches the relationship between empathy and language, describing the ways in which different dimensions of empathy can be attested in naturally occurring interactional data. The authors adopt the definition of empathy as a multidimensional phenomenon: emotional contagion, as well as the cognitive and affective dimensions of empathy, are all understood to be central to the empathetic process. The article promotes the view that studying the relationship between empathy and language should be grounded in the analysis of real-life interactions. Language evolves in social interaction both phylogenetically and ontogenetically, and is not only an important product but also a means of human sociality. The authors suggest that the best approach for analyzing the empathy–language interface combines the theoretical insights of cognitive grammar with the method of conversation analysis. The paper shows that when empathy is analyzed in natural conversation, we can do sequential and linguistic analysis of the ways in which affect is shown, and through a careful analysis of grammatical devices, offer an explanation of whether the displays of affect are derived from the other person's situation. By analyzing the complex ways in which the interactants orient to the different dimensions of empathy, the paper shows how linguistic analysis can give us concrete tools for forming a deeper understanding of how empathy takes place in real-life encounters.

This paper presents a novel analysis of aspiration, preaspiration, and the related phenomena of sonorant devoicing and spirantization in an Optimality Theoretic framework. Central to the analysis are two constraints: one requires that the feature [spread glottis] be shared by adjacent consonants, and another prohibits moraic [spread glottis] stops. Aspirated stops are singleton stops that are specified as [spread glottis]. Unaspirated stops either have no [spread glottis] feature or share a [spread glottis] feature with another consonant. There is no movement of aspiration or the [spread glottis] feature from one segment to another as in earlier analyses. This account is fully in accord with phonetic descriptions and is of theoretical interest because it supports the fission analysis of preaspiration and is consistent with the assumption that geminates are moraic consonants.

Our long-term goal is to contribute to the integration of formal and lexical semantics. Our more immediate theoretical starting point is the idea of “text as theory”, within a model-theoretic semantic framework. We describe a set of empirical problems in the domain of genitive modifiers that offers a challenge to theories of the integration of lexical, compositional, and contextual information. After sketching a solution, we raise the issue of metonymy in the interpretation of genitives, and examine the role of sortal information in the specification of underspecified meanings and in processes of type-shifting and sort-shifting, including metonymy.

As a result of present-day technological standards, the technique of computer simulation is constantly gaining influence in cognitive science. Neurolinguistics is a special branch of this field in which cognitive capacities connected with language are related to the structure and functions of the brain. It is argued that computer simulation is a useful technique for evaluating neurolinguistic models. This is demonstrated with respect to neural network models of the process of language production.

In Norwegian, these two types of constructions expressing an NP with a (prenominal) possessor exist:

(i) Pers bil ‘Peter's car’

(ii) Per sin bil Peter his, refl. car ‘Peter's car’

I argue that the s in (i) is not a case affix, but rather a variant of sin. Furthermore, I discuss how [Per] in (ii) assigned Case, and the fact that Per and sin apparently share a theta-role. I suggest that they constitute a chain in (ii), to which Case and a theta-role is assigned.

I shall compare the definition of “chain” in Chomsky 1981 to the modified definition of Kayne 1981. The modified definition, together with other principles suggested by Kayne 1981/1983, not only permits our analysis of (ii), but also provides interesting predictions about this construction, and indirectly about the lack of it in a related language, Icelandic.

Quantitative and qualitative studies of referential relations in unrestricted natural text are necessary both for a better theoretical understanding of referential processes, and for the development of empirically well-founded algorithms for anaphora resolution in the framework of natural language processing (NLP) systems. The aim of the study reported in this paper was to provide preliminary empirical data on anaphoric pronouns in Swedish. The relation between the pronoun and its antecedent was studied for 600 pronouns in three different types of unrestricted written Swedish text, and a simple pronoun resolution algorithm was tested on the sample.

This paper is a corpus-based investigation of five Swedish constructions that are used to express futurity. The method of Collexeme Analysis (Stefanowitsch & Gries 2003) is applied to constructions with the auxiliaries ska ‘will’, skall ‘shall’, its past form skulle ‘should’, komma ‘come’, and tänka ‘think’. All of these are future markers that have grammaticalized to varying degrees. The aim of this paper is to investigate semantic differences between constructions with these auxiliaries. By analyzing the main verbs that co-occur with a given auxiliary, it can be statistically assessed what verbs are significantly attracted to the construction. It thus becomes possible to analyze the constructional semantics in terms of co-occurring lexical material. Conversely, it is also insightful to consider what verbs occur significantly less often than expected with a given auxiliary. These procedures allow a fine-grained semantic description in both positive and negative terms.

Two production studies and one perception study were designed to systematically test F0 alignment and segment duration in Icelandic pitch accents with a view to investigating previous claims about the inventory of distinct intonational categories. Four different conditions were tested: (i) prenuclear pitch accents, (ii) nuclear accents in sentence-final position in sentences with either broad focus or (iii) with final narrow focus, and (iv) nuclear narrow focus accents in non-final position. The alignment results are such that (i) prenuclear accents are signalled by a late rise (L*H), while final nuclear accents are signalled by an early rise; (ii) F0 peaks in prefinal nuclear accents are aligned earlier than in prenuclear accents, but later than in final nuclear accents, suggesting a prosodic boundary effect. The duration measurements suggest a positional, but no focus, effect on the duration of the accented syllable and its vowel, such that syllables/vowels earlier in the sentence are longer than later ones.

Longitudinal acquisition studies of inflectional paradigms of Finish have shown, for example, that certain type of stem confusions predominate in the errors during the first few years of language acquisition. The present study focused upon the development of the (possible) base forms in verbs and nominals (i.e. nouns, adjectives, numerals and pronouns) of Finnish in the speech of the authors' son between ages 1.5 and 5.6. Various factors are discussed that appear to account for most of the errors in a satisfactory manner, e.g., frequency of a related form in caretaker speech, the degree of isomorphy (or transparency) found in the inflection as well as the role of the self-directed speech of the child.

This article investigates the use of non-referential subjects in contemporary Swedish. Given that Swedish has developed a strong subject requirement, expletive subjects are expected to be used in all clauses which lack a referential subject. In spoken Swedish, however, expletive and quasi-argument subjects are optional in utterances where there is an initial det ‘it’ which is linked to an empty position inside a finite or non-finite complement. The paper establishes that there are certain similarities between these examples and tough constructions but that the examples involving finite complements cannot be subsumed under a predication analysis which seems appropriate for the tough cases. Based on a number of authentic recorded examples, I discuss the processing of utterances with fronted anaphoric pronouns and point to certain similarities with parasitic gaps. The paper closes with a comparison with other Germanic languages.

This study analyses the emergence of the noun plural category in typically developing Danish-speaking children from its first appearance up to the age of 10 years, focusing on the impact of sound structure and input frequency. We use a multi-method research approach comparing different data types (dictionary data, naturalistic spontaneous child language input and output, semi-naturalistic/semi-experimental data, experimental data and reported data). We define cross-linguistically three degrees of stem changes (no change, prosodic change, phonemic change), and we also define three degrees of productivity of plural markers (which combine stem change and suffix). Noun plurals emerge from an early age, typically around the second birthday, but the acquisition is still underway at the age of ten years. Plural acquisition is affected by frequency and morphophonological category. Danish children produce more correct plural stems of nouns with non-changing plural stems compared to plural nouns with stem change, and more correct plural stems of nouns with prosodic change than with phonemic change. Furthermore, they produce more correct plural suffixes of nouns with a-schwa suffix than with e-schwa and zero suffix. Danish children also produce more correct plural forms of nouns with a fully productive than a semi-productive plural marker, and more of the latter than of nouns with an unproductive plural marker. We also discuss the important role in Danish of the plural marker ø, where pl = sg.

This paper focusses upon the semantics of cojunctions and their referential properties in texts.

It is show that the function of conjunctions can be descrined in terms of deictic theory of didcourse reference. The main argument is that there is in principle neituer a functional nor an original historical difference berween pronominal/deictic expressions on the one hand, and conjunctions on the other.

Some general aspects of the historical evolution of conjunctional expressions in Germanic languages are presented which are necessary in order to reach an explanatory level in linguistic description. Thus an analysis of the processes of univerbation, deletion, morphological differentiation, and shifts of morphological classes is given, based on data from the different branches of Germanic.

At present, there is no comprehensive psycholinguistic database containing Swedish words with ratings of word properties such as e.g. imageability, although researchers carrying out psycholinguistic studies in Swedish face the need to be able to control for and systematically vary such properties. The present study addressed this issue by investigating the possibility of transferring English word ratings to Swedish. Imageability, familiarity and age of acquisition (AoA) ratings were obtained for a sample of Swedish words (N = 99). These ratings were then compared with the corresponding English ratings from the Medical Research Council (MRC) Psycholinguistic Database (Coltheart 1981) using Spearman correlation. Swedish and English word ratings were found to be highly correlated for imageability and AoA, and moderately correlated for familiarity. Following these results, we suggest that, in general, ratings of these variables can be reliably transferred between the two languages, although some caution should be taken, since for some individual words, some ratings might differ substantially for their Swedish and English translations.

The article discusses the placement of the VP anaphor det ‘it’ as a complement of verbs selecting VP complements in Danish. With verbs that only allow a VP complement, the VP anaphor must be in SpecCP regardless of its information structure properties. If SpecCP is occupied by an operator, the anaphor can be in situ, but it cannot shift. With verbs that allow its VP complement to alternate with an NP complement, the VP anaphor can be in SpecCP, shifted or in situ according to the information structural properties of the anaphor. Only if SpecCP is occupied by an operator, must a topical anaphor be in situ. The article argues that a shifted pronominal in Danish must be categorially licensed by the verb and extends this analysis to shifting locatives. An Optimality Theory analysis is proposed that accounts for the observed facts.

In this paper, we argue that the subject requirement or Extended Projection Principle (EPP) is naturally derived from predication, not in the standard syntax-based manner of Rothstein (1983), Chomsky (1986) or Heycock (1991), but in a full-blooded semantic manner within the selective mentalist Grammar Semantics of Bouchard (1995). We propose that the EPP is the effect of a basic proposition-forming operation of natural language, which is induced by a predication operator (Bowers 1993). On our analysis, insertion of an expletive in the subject position or raising to the subject position are therefore ultimately analysed as semantically motivated processes, triggered by the operation of proposition formation.

Building on data from Icelandic, this article argues that there are two kinds of case variation, formal and semantic. The first type features lexical case as one of the variants whereas the second type involves structural vs. inherent case. The semantic effect found with the latter kind of variation follows from the semantic requirements associated with inherent case and these may cut across different uses of the same verb. It is also shown how the weak status of disappearing lexical case manifests itself in the grammar of Icelandic and Faroese.

The typological variation between the Nordic languages offers a “natural laboratory” for the cross-linguistic study of first language acquisition. Based on an on-going inter-Nordic project, the present article discusses research designs for the exploration of this laboratory together with pilot analyses of acquisition data across Danish, Finnish, Icelandic, Norwegian and Swedish. On the basis of evidence from longitudinal case studies, from narrative tasks, and from morphological and phonetic experiments, the project aims at producing an integrated picture of the development of grammatical morphology and its interaction with (a) the semantic domains of spatial and temporal relations and (b) the prosodic domains of tonal word accents and duration. In the present article the focus is on spatial relations and prosody. Comparisons of developmental data between languages that show considerable typological differences (Finnish vs Icelandic vs the Mainland Scandinavian languages) allow us to establish broad cross-linguistic commonalities in acquisition structure. It is shown that, across all five languages, very similar relational concepts are encoded by the first grammatical morphemes emerging in the field of spatial relations. The impact of linguistic details on acquisition structure can be explored with greater precision through comparisons between languages that show minimal typological differences (the internal differences between the Mainland Scandinavian languages: Danish vs Norwegian vs Swedish). Here, the early development of the Verb + particle construction in two Danish and two Swedish children is analysed. Language-specific effects on acquisition structure of syntactical and prosodic traits are demonstrated. Further, language-specific effects on the development of verb argument structure in spatial descriptions are discussed.

This paper presents new empirical evidence for a process description of quantity in Swedish. Like most other Germanic languages, Swedish possesses a rich array of stress-governing derivational suffixes which cause stress and length alternations in the stems to which they are attached. Such alternations bear crucially on the choice between a unit-oriented or process-oriented approach to Swedish phonology. Inasmuch as 18-vowel-phoneme solutions presuppose lexically inherent vocalic length, they result in a multitude of morphophonemic alternations between long and short vowels. In process solutions, such quantitative alternations follow predictably from independently motivated rules. These results have important implications for the description of the phonemic system, phonotactics, rule component, and morphological structure of the language. The conclusions are directly valid also for Norwegian.

A multiple methods approach was applied to the study of morphology on the processing of lexical items in Swedish. Data from slips-of-the-tongue, agrammatic speech production, agrammatic oral reading, and lexical decision experiments were used. The results indicate that whole word processing as well as morphological processing takes place in the different types of tasks. The type of processing seems to vary along a continuum, with whole word processing as the most commonly applied type in automatized and relatively simple processing (such as lexical decision for common Swedish words), whereas signs of morpheme-based processing appear less often, and perhaps in less automatized tasks (such as agrammatic speech production).