This is the first issue of volume 37 of the Nordic Journal of Linguistics. NJL is the journal of the Nordic Association of Linguists. Individuals may subscribe to the Journal by joining the Nordic Association of Linguists. The NAL membership form can be found on the Cambridge University Press web site of NJL, http://journals.cambridge.org/NJL, as well as on the NAL web site, http://www.uef.fi/nal.

Recent decades of research in linguistics have seen a shift towards empirical methods and an increased use of data from corpora as a basis for making claims about language (Sampson 2005). This trend has made its mark on research on the Nordic languages also, and the current special issue aims to show some of the breadth of research in this field. The issue is in its entirety devoted to contributions that use the methodology of corpus linguistics on Nordic language data. This includes research that investigates both historical and contemporary aspects of the languages of the Nordic region.

It has been suggested that Danish is a language particularly prone to spoken language reductions in spontaneous speech. Previous studies have shown that reduction phenomena, in Danish and other languages, are rule-governed by e.g. phonological context, word frequency and stress patterns. This paper analyses two reduction phenomena, those occurring in the endings -ede and -te in a genre of spoken Danish which is particularly resistant to reductions, viz. radio news readings. Its first aim is to establish the reduction rules of formal spoken Danish and compare these with the rules of more informal spoken Danish, e.g. sociolinguistic interviews. Reduction of -te is found to follow the same general rules as in spontaneous speech, although reductions are far less frequent in news readings. Reduction of -ede is found to follow rules different from those of spontaneous speech. The second aim is to investigate whether the reduction rules have changed over the 70 years which the data span. It is found that the rules, and thus the style, have indeed changed. The modern rules appear to be simpler and include less complex interaction effects.

The purpose of this article is to show that Norwegian has complex predicates, in which two verbs are reanalyzed as one predicate in a monoclausal structure, comparable to complex predicates that have been proposed for other languages. The central evidence comes from the construction called the long passive, in which the subject of the first verb is typically the patient of the second verb. Norwegian long passives often have passive morphology on both verbs, and I consider this a case of verbal feature agreement. The article also discusses evidence for complex predicates from active sentences.

The development of grammatical markers has been described from several theoretical perspectives over the last decade: Grammaticalization Theory (Hopper & Traugott 2003, Heine, Claudi & Hünnemeyer (1991), the Minimalist Program (Roberts & Roussou 2003, van Gelderen 2004), and Lexical-Functional Grammar (Vincent 2001), see also the overview in (Börjars & Vincent 2010). It has recently been addressed in Construction Grammar, where it is argued that a shift towards a constructional perspective on change may yield new insights into the workings of grammaticalization (Bergs & Diewald 2008, Hoffmann & Trousdale 2013, Traugott & Trousdale 2013). This paper should be taken as a contribution to a constructional view on grammaticalization. It is about the rise of the concessive subordinator fast(än) in the history of Swedish occurring in a construction or clause type called universal concessive conditional (Haspelmath & Köning 1998), in Swedish generaliserande bisats (SAG 1999). The Swedish fast, etymologically (and still productively) as an adjective in the meaning ‘steady’, ‘robust’ is used as an intensifier, ‘very’, ‘much’, in early Modern Swedish, eventually established as a concessive marker ‘even if’, ‘although’ in the 18th century. The conventionalization of a concessive inference is highly interesting and may be traced back to specific constructions in the 16th and 17th centuries. On the basis of an extensive corpus study, I analyze the critical contexts and discuss the development as constructional change rather than lexical change, arguing that a remapping between form and function takes place in concessive conditional constructions due to processes of inferencing and mismatch.

The second issue of Volume 38 (autumn 2015) of the Nordic Journal of Linguistics will be a special issue devoted to prosody in the Nordic languages. The special issue will be edited by Merle Horne and Mikael Roll.

Keyword analysis has been used to investigate properties of style and genre, as a tool in discourse analysis, and as a method of identifying differences between the speech of distinct social groups. It has often been criticised as a blunt tool which can exaggerate what differences are present and fails to distinguish between quite distinct phenomena. However, it remains a very powerful tool for wide analysis of systematic differences between corpora when used with sufficient scepticism. This paper uses keyword analysis to examine differences between the speech of male and female characters in the Íslendingasögur, narrative prose texts composed in Iceland in the 13th and 14th centuries. This dataset is of particular interest because such representations of speech are the only window on the language of social groups who were not involved in text production in medieval societies. It aims to demonstrate a rigorous application of keyword analysis, exemplifying what it can and, crucially, what it cannot show.

Within the Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG) community, one part of the Base Hypothesis concerning free relatives proposed by Bresnan & Grimshaw (1978) has gained wide support, namely that free relatives are headed by the wh-phrase. The second part of the hypothesis is that the wh-phrase is base-generated, and this has not gained support. In this paper, we will consider a subset of free relative constructions, i.e. non-specific free relatives, and provide support for this second part, restated in HPSG terms as a claim that there is no filler–gap relation between a free relative pronoun filler and a gap in the sister clause of the free relative pronoun.

This paper discusses criteria for distinguishing attributive (also known as adjectival) clauses and relative clauses, and argues that traditional approaches to these subclause categories and their interrelation lack consistency as well as empirical justification, from a modern Scandinavian perspective. Relative clauses are traditionally and in current Scandinavian reference grammars treated as a formally defined clause type with the attributive function as their prototypical, but not their only, constituent function. In this paper it is argued that the traditional criteria for identifying relative clauses, especially in Danish, Norwegian and Swedish, are essentially not formal but functional criteria, more or less identical to those applied to identify attributive clauses. Indeed, the modern Scandinavian languages, it is argued, hardly offer the empirical basis for a coherent category of relative clauses to be consistently distinguished on formal criteria. Rather, to account for the heterogeneous inventory of subclauses traditionally associated with relative clauses, a general outline of the functional category of attributive clauses in Danish is proposed, based on authentic spoken and written Danish discourse. Traditional definitions of attributive clauses are discussed and refined, and are shown to apply to a different and wider range of Danish subclause forms than has traditionally been recognised.

In a recent NJL article (Enger 2013), Hans-Olav Enger argues against some analyses of gender and ‘pancake sentences’, in particular against Josefsson (2009). In this short contribution, I will discuss what I take to be misunderstandings in Enger (2013). In addition I will discuss some data not included in Enger's (2013) analysis, which I will show to be crucial for the comparison between the different analyses proposed.

It is generally assumed that universal island constraints block extraction from relative clauses. However, it is well-known that such extractions can be acceptable in the Scandinavian languages. Kush & Lindahl (2011) argue that the acceptability in Swedish is illusory; relative clauses that allow extraction have a different structure (small clause structure) from those that block extraction (true relatives, CPs). We present data from an acceptability survey of relative clause extraction in Danish. In the survey, extraction significantly decreased acceptability but we found no statistically significant effect of the ability of the verb to take a small-clause complement. We also found no difference between som ‘that/who/which’ and der ‘that/who/which’, both of which can head a relative clause while only som can head a small clause. We argue that our results do not warrant the stipulation of a structural contrast between acceptable and unacceptable extractions, and that variation in acceptability stems from processing.

This article presents a corpus-based investigation of the motivations behind the use of the s-passive and the bli-passive in contemporary written Swedish. Following a probabilistic approach to language variation and building on observations in the literature, we examine the simultaneous effects of semantic and syntactic factors by means of a multivariate statistical analysis. Our corpus sample includes 1,197 passive sentences of three Swedish verbs, which alternate in their use of the passive (acceptera ‘accept’, behandla ‘treat’ and välja ‘choose’). The results suggest that the choice of passive form is significantly associated with five predictor variables: Subject Animacy, Subject Number, Modal Verb, Av-phrase (‘by’-phrase) and Aktionsart. Among these, Subject Animacy and Modal Verb appear to yield the strongest impact effect on the choice of passive form. The study adds to earlier research in that it allows for a more accurate analysis of the simultaneous effect and relative strength of each factor on the speaker's choice of one of the passive forms.

Previous studies have shown the productive nature of eye and how it enters into patterns of a more or less non-compositional nature (e.g. Sinclair 1991a, Więcławska 2012). This paper adds a contrastive dimension and explores the cross-linguistic phraseology of the English–Norwegian cognates eye and øye on the basis of monolingual, bilingual and multilingual corpora. Starting with a survey of uses in the bidirectional English–Norwegian Parallel Corpus+ (ENPC+), the contrastive analysis reveals that while the two languages overlap in many of their uses of eye/øye-expressions, differences also emerge, particularly with regard to the number of recurrent patterns recorded and their conditions of use. English has more recurrent patterns with eye, but Norwegian has by far the most frequent pattern, få øye på ‘catch sight of’ (lit.: get eye on). Following this general cross-linguistic survey, a focused contrastive case study of få øye på and its English correspondences shows how a combination of bilingual and monolingual corpora may complement each other in contrastive research. The study uncovers that English has three main correspondences – catch sight of, see and spot – of which the first is the one favoured by bilingual dictionaries. An in-depth analysis of få øye på and catch sight of and their extended context, i.e. when they are part of extended units of meaning (e.g. Sinclair 1996), suggests that although the two patterns are perfectly matched, there are substantial differences when it comes to their frequency of use. This contributes to the relatively low mutual correspondences in the bidirectional translation material at hand.

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.

Although Faroese exhibits extensive linguistic variation and rapid social change, the language is near-uncharted territory in variationist sociolinguistics. This article discusses some recent social changes in Faroese society in connection with language change, focusing in particular on the development of a de facto spoken standard, Central Faroese. Demographic mobility, media and education may be contributing to this development in different ways. Two linguistic variables are analysed as a first step towards uncovering the respective roles of standardisation, dialect levelling and dialect spread as contributing processes in the formation of Central Faroese: morphological variation in -st endings and phonological variation in -ir and -ur endings. The analysis confirms previously described patterns of geographically constrained variation, but no generational or stylistic differences indicative of language change are found, nor are there clear signs that informants use Central Faroese. The results may in part be due to the structure of the corpus used.

This study analyses the relationship between four near-synonymous Swedish prepositions, namely angående, beträffande, gällande and rörande, which are used to establish what we call a topic-marking relation, as in statens avtal angående finansieringen ‘the agreement of the state regarding the financing’. By focusing on a single, loosely defined genre consisting of the written texts included in the Swedish PAROLE corpus, we address the question of what differences there are among these four prepositions, which intuitively seem highly similar and mutually interchangeable. In order to find out which contextual and grammatical factors might influence the choice of one preposition over the others, two complementary analyses were performed. First, a so-called collostructional analysis (see Stefanowitsch & Gries 2003, Gries & Stefanowitsch 2004) was performed on 791 cases of these prepositions found in the PAROLE corpus. Secondly, the corpus examples were annotated according to ten syntactic and four semantic criteria and a multinomial logistic regression analysis was performed on the annotated data set. The results show some tendencies pointing to differing usage patterns of the four prepositions. Beträffande stands out as the most frequent of them all and is also preferably used when no explicit head element is present, typically in sentence-initial position. Angående prefers words of communication while rörande is used when another topic-marking preposition is also present. On the other hand, neither of the two analyses leads to a clear distinction among the four prepositions, thus pointing to the fact that these topic-marking prepositions indeed constitute a fairly good case of adpositional synonymy, with few distinguishing factors separating one from the other.

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.