This paper investigates the status of the lexicon and the possibilities for expressing lexical generalizations in the paradigm of Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG). We illustrate that the architecture readily supports the use of implicational principles to express generalizations over a class of word objects. A second kind of lexical generalizations expressing relations between classes of words is often expressed in terms of lexical rules. We show how lexical rules can be integrated into the formal setup for HPSG developed by King (1989, 1994), investigate a lexical rule specification language allowing the linguist to only specify those properties which are supposed to differ between the related classes, and define how this lexical rule specification language is interpreted. We thereby provide a formalization of lexical rules as used in HPSG.

This paper first briefly outlines the general political, economic, cultural and linguistic situation in the era of the Hanseatic League. Then the dichotomy ‘language contact’ vs ‘dialect contact’ is discussed in detail. The main focus lies, however, on a thorough investigation of various forms of bilingualism and especially on the concept of semi-communication. It is shown that this concept (roughly, the way Scandinavians today communicate with each other by means of their vernaculars) has played an important role in most linguistic contacts in the area of the Hansa. Several pragmatic and semiotic conditions as well as communicational maxims are presented, together with some interlinguistic rules of thumb. The paper concludes with a summary of the main characteristics of the various language contacts to be observed during the age of the Hansa and of the typological consequences for the modern Scandinavian languages.

This paper outlines a model designed for the description of East Norwegian sencetece intonation. It is argued that there is a specific kind of intonational structure in Norwegian that is restricted to assertions and which will therefore normally be perceived as a prosodic clue to the indentification of assertive clauses, whether embedded ro syntactically independent.

This paper focuses on the origin of the V2 property in the history of Germanic. Considering data from Gothic and Old English (OE), it is suggested that the historical core of the V2 phenomenon reduces to V-to-C movement that is triggered in operator contexts. Therefore, the historical system shares basic properties with limited V2 in Modern English. It is shown that apparent deviations from this pattern that can be observed in Gothic can be attributed to the influence of Greek word order. Concerning the apparently more elaborate V2 properties of OE, it is claimed that a large part of them in fact do not involve a Spec-head relation, but rather result from linear adjacency between the clause-initial element and a finite verb located in T0. Special attention is paid to the placement of pronominal subjects in OE, which are claimed to occupy SpecTP. This contrasts with a lower position of full subjects due to the absence of an EPP in OE. Finally, the loss of superficial V2 orders in the Middle English period is attributed to the development of an EPP feature in T.

This paper argues for a unified analysis of mainland Scandinavian pronominal object shift and Icelandic full NP shift. Building on data showing the impact of accessibility on object placement in Swedish, Danish and Icelandic, I propose an Optimality Theoretic analysis where semantic/pragmatic constraints involving accessibility, information structure and contrast interact, but are ranked lower than syntactic constraints on, for example, verb placement. Finally, the impact of prosody on pronominal object shift is discussed.

This study investigates the linguistic characteristics of Swedish clinical text in radiology reports and doctor's daily notes from electronic health records (EHRs) in comparison to general Swedish and biomedical journal text. We quantify linguistic features through a comparative register analysis to determine how the free text of EHRs differ from general and biomedical Swedish text in terms of lexical complexity, word and sentence composition, and common sentence structures. The linguistic features are extracted using state-of-the-art computational tools: a tokenizer, a part-of-speech tagger, and scripts for statistical analysis. Results show that technical terms and abbreviations are more frequent in clinical text, and lexical variance is low. Moreover, clinical text frequently omit subjects, verbs, and function words resulting in shorter sentences. Clinical text not only differs from general Swedish, but also internally, across its sub-domains, e.g. sentences lacking verbs are significantly more frequent in radiology reports. These results provide a foundation for future development of automatic methods for EHR simplification or clarification.

This article reports on a syntactic acceptability judgement study of 59 adult L2/Ln learners of Norwegian and a group of native controls, studying subject and object shift. These constructions involve movement of (mainly) pronominal subjects or objects across negation/adverbs. Both subject shift and object shift display considerable micro-variation in terms of syntax and information structure, dependent on factors such as nominal type (pronoun vs. full DP), function (subject vs. object), and information status (given vs. new/focused). Previous studies have shown that Norwegian children have an early preference for the unshifted position in both constructions, but that they acquire subject shift relatively early (before age 3). Object shift, on the other hand, is typically not in place until after age 6–7. Importantly, children are conservative learners, and never shift elements that should not move in the adult language. The results of the current study show that L2/Ln learners do not make all the fine distinctions that children make, in that they have a clear preference for all subjects in shifted position and all objects in unshifted position, although some distinctions fall into place with increased proficiency. Importantly, unlike children, the L2/Ln learners are not conservative learners; rather, they over-accept syntactic movement in several cases. The equivalent to this in language production would be to apply syntactic movement where it is not attested in the target language, which would be the opposite behaviour to that observed in L1 children.

This article is concerned with the description and analysis of Övdalian referential null subjects. A general background to Övdalian is provided together with the syntactic restrictions on the possible null subjects (wįð ‘we’ and ið ‘you’). Interestingly, these null subjects in Övdalian do not appear in the same syntactic positions. This syntactic difference leads us to the conclusion that the distribution of the two possible null subjects must be explained individually. I argue here that the syntactic restrictions indicate that null wįð requires a link to the surrounding context in order to be identified, whereas the identification of null ið seems to be dependent on the agreement affix. I build on the proposal of Koeneman (2006), and argue that affixes may have pronominal properties, proposing that this gives an explanation as to why null ið is not restricted in the same fashion as null wįð. Finally, Övdalian is discussed in a wider Germanic context, and it is shown that Övdalian is one of a small number of non-standard Germanic languages which allow referential null subjects.

On the basis of an examination of remnant VP-topicalisation constructions, this paper argues for an order preservation analysis of Scandinavian Object Shift. Extending the empirical database, we account for the phenomena in an Optimality Theoretic framework. The paper focusses on two particular constructions in Danish and Swedish, namely particle verb constructions and causative constructions with Danish lade and Swedish låta ‘let’. It is shown how differences in the VP-internal object position give rise to mirror image sequences concerning Object Shift in connection with verb second (V°-to-I°-to-C° movement) and with remnant VP-topicalisation.

This paper presents an analysis of Icelandic umlaut in Optimality Theory. We account for umlaut in sal[œ]t-[Y]m ‘lettuce’ (dat. pl.) and d[œ:]g-[Y]m ‘day’ (dat. pl.), in which /a/ is fronted and rounded when followed by [Y], as well as forms such as j[œ]kli ‘glacier’ (dat. sg.) and b[œ]rn ‘child’ (ace. pl.) with an umlauted vowel, but no overt trigger. We explain why there is no umlaut in forms such as dal-n[Y]m ‘valley’ (def.), kakt[Y]s ‘cactus’ (nom. sg.), or d[a:]g-[Y]r ‘day’ (nom. sg.) despite the fact that /a/ occurs in the umlaut environment. We also explain why there is one umlauted vowel in sal[œ]t-[Y]m ≪ /salat + Ym/, but two umlauted vowels in f[œ]t-n[Y]ð-[Y]m ≪ /fat + nað + Ym/ ‘clothing’ (dat. pl.) and why the umlauted vowel is sometimes [Y] and sometimes [œ].

This paper investigates a surprising interpretational asymmetry in modal-negation sequences in Norwegian: When the negation word follows the subject, the sentence is ambiguous with respect to the relative scopes of the negation and the modal. When negation precedes the subject, however, the negation unambiguously takes scope over the modal. I argue that this asymmetry can be accounted for by assuming that verb raising has semantic implications; contrary to Chomsky (2001a). Modal-negation sequences in subordinate clauses do not display the same asymmetry, which supports the hypothesis that verb raising causes the observed patterns. Moreover, many speakers reject the sequence negation-subject in subordinate clauses. I propose that, for these speakers, main clauses employ two adjunction sites for negation, whereas subordinate clauses employ only one.

Pronouns with a demonstrative function appear in most of the Scandinavian languages in phrases like Sjå på han mannen ‘Look at that man’. Despite the Scandinavian languages varying in phrase-internal morphosyntactic definiteness agreement requirements generally, the pronoun demonstrative appears universally with a definite noun (phrase). This is accounted for within a Lexical-Functional Grammar framework, where the pronoun demonstrative is treated as carrying the feature [specific = +], and the definite noun (phrase) is the morphosyntactic realisation of underlying specificity also. In addition, there is variation as to whether the pronoun demonstratives occur as a specifier within the NP, or as the head of its own DP, taking an NP object.

This article gives a cognitively based account of polysemous transitivity alternations, which are Agent-preserving with some verbs and Object-preserving with others. The data from three languages – Asiatic Eskimo, Boumaa Fijian and Bambara – are presented. It is argued that the mechanism of the distribution of the meanings of these TAs is semantic in nature and does not depend upon the coding technique used by a language.

The paper presents Referent Grammar (RG), a version of generalized phrase structure grammar. RG uses descriptive labels for defective categories (categories tacking a constituent) instead of slash expressions and needs no null (empty, zero) categories. RG uses both functional and categorial representations and the grammar rules, written in the Prolog DCG formalism, relate these two levels. The functional representations of RG include referent variables (numbers) with noun phrases which makes it possible to keep track of the referents within the sentences and in the text. Relative clauses can be defined in a new way using these referents and the referent, enriched with grammatical features, can be used for controlling agreement. Substantial fragments of Swedish and English grammars have been implemented in RG and the print-out of a demo session shows how RG works in computerized analysis, generation and translation of Swedish and English sentences.

We address the question whether speakers activate different grammars when they encounter linguistic input from different registers, here written standardised language and spoken dialect. This question feeds into the larger theoretical and empirical question if variable syntactic patterns should be modelled as switching between different registers/grammars, or as underspecified mappings from form to meaning within one grammar. We analyse 6000 observations from 26 high school students from Tromsø, comprising more than 20 phonological, morphological, lexical and syntactic variables obtained from two elicited production experiments: one using standardised written language and one using spoken dialect as the elicitation source. The results suggest that most participants directly activate morphophonological forms from the local dialect when encountering standardised orthographic forms, suggesting that they do not treat the written and spoken language as different grammars. Furthermore, the syntactic variation does not track the morphophonological variation, which suggests that code/register-switching alone cannot explain syntactic optionality.

This paper critically examines the exclusive use of the relative frequency of subordinate clauses as a measure of syntactic complexity in Second Language Acquisition (SLA) L2 acquisition and as an indicator of Second Language (L2) development. Following Lambert & Kormos (2014), it is argued that it is important to also take into account: (i) different subordinate clause types, (ii) item-based frequencies, and (iii) text genre. Longitudinal written data was collected among 21 Dutch-speaking foreign language learners of Swedish. Based on these data, the study shows that the subordination ratio (a common measure for syntactic complexity) alone was found to be insufficient as an indicator of syntactic complexity and L2 development, as hardly any significant differences were observed in the subordination ratios of the learners and native speakers. The study shows that other aspects are also relevant in determining the learners’ level of syntactic complexity as well as their L2 development, such as the internal structure and context of subordinate clauses, subordinate clause types, and especially the type-token ratio of subordinators used. The results showed a significant negative correlation between the subordination ratio of texts and the type-token ratio of subordinators. The aim of the study is to acknowledge the variation in the learners’ use of subordinate clause, in addition to the general subordination ratio, in order to arrive at a more nuanced view of syntactic complexity in second language acquisition.

Are some languages universally seen as beautiful? And if so, what are the linguistic traits that make some languages sound more pleasing than others? This paper addresses these two questions. We do so with results from two listener experiments that use speech samples from a bilingual Danish–Swedish speaker in a matched guise test, where the listeners are ‘previously unexposed’ students from central China. Our results indicate that listeners from Central China with no previous exposure find Swedish more pleasing sounding than Danish. This finding provides evidence that there could be features of language that sound more beautiful to listeners cross-culturally. In a follow-up experiment we remove the intonation contours of the speech to see whether this prosodic trait plays a role for evaluations. The results show that the difference in evaluations between Swedish and Danish disappears when both speech samples are monotonised. We discuss the importance of our findings for language attitudes research.

In this paper, the Norwegian progressive forms are examined by way of a corpus study, including both a monolingual corpus and a Norwegian–English parallel corpus. The corpora reveal patterns and properties of Norwegian progressives that are novel compared to those of a well-studied aspectual system like that in English. The study shows that the progressives should be grouped into two subgroups, according to their combinatorial and semantic properties. The array of properties that is brought out by the examination of the monolingual and parallel corpora is accounted for in a formal semantic frame, based on works by Dowty (1979) and Krifka (1992, 1998), and also drawing on insights from, among others, Rothstein (1999, 2004).

This paper deals with the syntax of the so-called ‘complex passive’ and, more generally, with investigating the range, effects, and interaction of certain reanalysis processes that have been claimed to be operative in this and other syntactic constructions.