This special issue of the Nordic Journal of Linguistics is devoted to grammaticalization. In our call for papers, we emphasized that the term should be understood in a broad sense, inviting empirically as well as theoretically based papers. Almost all aspects of language may be studied from a grammaticalization perspective, and the concept is generally also understood as including diachronic as well as synchronic linguistic studies. The three selected papers reflect some of the richness of the field of grammaticalization.

To all the reviewers who have reviewed papers for the Nordic Journal of Linguistics in the year 2005, we would like to express our heartfelt thanks for your time and effort. We do this also on the part of the editors of the special issue on Dialects and Linguistic Theory, Øystein Alexander Vangsnes and Curt Rice.

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.

The second issue of Volume 20 (2007) of the Nordic Journal of Linguistics will be a special issue on Aspect. The guest editors are Raffaella Folli (University of Ulster), Heidi Harley (University of Arizona) and Britta Jensen (University of Cambridge).

The Extended Projection Principle (EPP) has remained a controversial topic in generative grammar. This article proposes to derive the EPP from a generalized theory of nominal case and verbal agreement. According to the proposal presented in this article, morphosyntactic features such as case and verbal phi-features are valued uniformly by the closest asymmetrically c-commanding element, whereas the PF interface is constrained so as to prevent verbs from being valued nominal case and nominals by verbal phi-features. This constraint together with a new theory of valuation explains the appearance of the EPP. The theory is applied to the investigation of negative clauses in Finnish and other languages, Finnish (elliptical) non-finite negative clauses, expletive constructions, multiple wh-movement in a variety of languages, multiple agreement both in the finite and nominal domains, and asymmetries between finite and non-finite clauses.

In contemporary informal Estonian, the negative verb form ei tea ‘don't know’ has become a routinized part of generic questions, in which the agent is left unexpressed. This pattern is in accordance with the general impersonal and reference-avoiding style of conversing in Estonia. The study outlines a continuum of synchronic usages from the original expressions sa ei tea ‘you don't know’ and ma ei tea ‘I don't know’ to the epistemic usages of (ei) tea, which are specifically tied to the speech act of questioning. The data is interactional and the analysis relies on the interpretation of (ei) tea-questions by the participants themselves, following the methodology of conversation analysis. It is demonstrated that the development of (ei) tea displays phonological and semantic erosion, pragmatic strengthening, subjectification, and decategorialization. Thus, grammaticalization theory is here combined with interactional linguistics in order to display the emergence of a grammatical structure from a discourse pattern.

An analysis of the English adverb then is suggested, which treats it as ambiguous, encoding two distinct meanings, one of which is anaphoric and corresponds to the meaning of the Norwegian temporal adverb da, and the other is non-anaphoric and corresponds to the meaning of the Norwegian temporal adverb så. The paper challenges the commonly made assumption that cases of supposed ambiguity which exist cross-linguistically might be better reanalyzed in terms of a univocal semantics and a range of pragmatic inferences, either as implicated meanings along Gricean lines or as the outcome of context-dependent inference at the explicit level of content, in keeping with the practice of adherents of Relevance Theory. Data from some other European languages and four African languages are examined and compared to the polar situations represented by English on the one hand and Norwegian on the other.

Ever since its introduction by Christian Lehmann in 1982, the term ‘degrammaticalization’ has been the subject of much controversy. There has been considerable disagreement about what kind of phenomena the term refers to, and indeed if degrammaticalization exists at all. In this paper I will argue that degrammaticalization is not grammaticalization in reverse, but a separate kind of change worthy of study in its own right. The purpose of this paper will be to show how degrammaticalization changes are best identified, by using existing linguistic tests as diagnostics for establishing changes in the morphological status of certain degrammaticalization suspects, and for assessing the nature of the subchanges involved. One of the stock examples of degrammaticalization literature, i.e. the s-genitive in Swedish, will serve as a case study.

A new formal analysis of the tonal accent contrast in Urban East Norwegian (UEN) is developed in this paper, based on Optimality Theory. Contrary to the widespread assumption that the contrast is based on privativity, this paper represents a return to the position that the contrast derives from different timing of a common underlying melody. Surface privativity, i.e. the absence vs. the presence of an H that can be observed in the contrast between accent 1 and 2 in UEN is analysed as the result of marked (accent 1) vs. unmarked (accent 2) association of a common tonal input. The marked status of accent 1 follows from lexical pre-linking, protected by high-ranking faithfulness, which overrides (unmarked) association driven by the markedness constraints alone.

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