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.

The theme of this special issue of the Nordic Journal of Linguistics was intended to solicit contributions on Nordic languages being acquired as non-native languages as well as work on Nordic-language native speakers learning a second language, not necessarily a Nordic one. We adopted a wide definition of the term ‘second language’ (L2), i.e. a non-native (second, third, etc.) language acquired in late childhood, adolescence or adulthood, in a naturalistic or an instructed setting.

This is the first issue of volume 33 of the Nordic Journal of Linguistics. The NJL is the journal of the Nordic Association of Linguists. Individuals may subscribe to the Nordic Journal of Linguistics by joining the Nordic Association of Linguists. The NAL membership form can be found on the Cambridge University Press web site of the NJL, <http://journals.cambridge.org/NJL>, as well as on the NAL web site, <http://cc.joensuu.fi/linguistics/nal>.

In this paper, I will present an empirical study on the use of the temporal adverbs nú and núna ‘now’ in Icelandic talk-in-interaction. The aim is to investigate whether the two words have different functions, and, if so, to describe these differences. As I will show, nú and núna show clear differences in respect to their syntactical distribution. Furthermore, I will argue, that the syntactic distribution also reflects differences on the functional level. While núna occurs in the end field and has a clear referential function, nú tends to occur in the front field and have closer ties to the finite verb. The theoretical and methodological framework for the study is interactional linguistics, and the data comprises my transcription of around fourteen hours of conversation.

All modern linguistic science – all theoretical frameworks and approaches – at one point or another becomes linguistic typology. Sooner or later they ask the fundamental typological questions: What are the universal features of human language? How do we explain their universality? And how do we explain those features of human language which are not universal, but which vary from language to language? How do variation and universality relate to each other? The methodology of linguistic typology – to approach these questions by mapping and comparing language data globally – is not necessarily shared by all linguists, but the basic questions remain the same.

In a recent study of the clause-initial position in verb-second declaratives (the prefield), Bohnacker & Rosén (2008) found significant differences between native Swedish and German concerning the frequencies with which constituents occurred in the prefield, as well as qualitative differences concerning the mapping of information structure and linear word order: Swedish exhibited a stronger tendency than German to place new information, the so-called rheme, later in the clause. Swedish-speaking learners of German transferred these patterns from their L1 to German. Their sentences were syntactically well-formed but had Swedish-style prefield frequencies and a strong pattern of Rheme Later, which native Germans perceive as unidiomatic, as an acceptability judgment and a rewrite-L2texts task showed. The present study extends Bohnacker & Rosén's work in three ways. Learners of the reverse language combination (L1 German, L2 Swedish) are investigated to see whether similar phenomena also manifest themselves there. Secondly, written and oral data from highly advanced learners are examined to see whether the learners’ persistent problems can be overcome by extensive immersion (3, 6 and 9 years of L2 exposure). Thirdly, besides investigating theme–rheme (old vs. new information), some consideration is given to another information-structural level, background vs. focus. The learners are found to overuse the prefield at first, with non-Swedish, German-style frequency patterns (e.g. low proportions of clause-initial expletives and high proportions of clause-initial rhematic elements). This is interpreted as evidence for L1 transfer of information-structural or discourse-pragmatic preferences. After 6 and 9 years, a substantial increase in clause-initial expletive subjects, clefts and lightweight given elements is indicative of development towards the target. The findings are related to current generative theorizing on the syntax-pragmatics interface, where it is often maintained that the integration of multiple types of information is one of the hardest areas for L2 learners to master.

This short communication presents a general overview of facts concerning wh-extraction from V2 clauses in the Scandinavian languages. While extraction from V2 clauses with a fronted non-subject is impossible in all of these languages, three classes can be distinguished with regard to extraction from subject-initial V2 clauses.

This article focuses on the methodological challenges involved in investigating anaphoric binding in Norwegian as a second language. Norwegian anaphors can be bound both locally and non-locally, and since anaphors vary cross-linguistically, it is interesting to explore whether and where L2 speakers of Norwegian allow such target-like local and non-local binding in their L2. Sentences with two possible antecedents might be ambiguous for L2 speakers, and the truth-value judgment task is generally considered to be the best method for eliciting knowledge of L2 speakers' intuitions of anaphoric binding in ambiguous sentences. In Norwegian, long-distance binding cannot cross a finite clause boundary, and the long-distance anaphor cannot be locally bound. Because of this, the truth-value judgment task is sometimes less adequate for testing all relevant binding structures in Norwegian. Dialectal variations in Norwegian pose additional challenges for the study of the acquisition of anaphors in an L2. This paper discusses the implications of these methodological challenges.

It is well-known that grammatical movement is somehow linked to functional heads. There is less agreement on the excact nature of this correlation. According to one view, phrases are moved to the specifier positions of functional heads because functional heads attract them. According to another view, movement is not triggered by functional heads alone, but depends on the larger grammatical context. For instance, one such proposal says that T (tense) becomes attractive only when selected by finite C (complementizer), while V becomes attractive when selected by v* (transitivizer). What attracts phrases are therefore the C–T system and the v*–V system as a whole, not the individual functional heads; moved phrases are then sandwitched between the two heads. In this article, we present evidence in favor of this view by looking at first language acquisition. The data shows that in child Finnish, subject determiner phrases (DPs) move into the position of grammatical subject if and only if the full complementizer system has matured. Movement to the (Spec, TP) subject position therefore depends on the presence of C.

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.

This article presents a study of the variation found in the oral production of verbs in L2 French by adult beginners with Swedish as L1. The study deals with the production of the two main forms of regular verbs in spoken French, a short form /parl/ and a long form /parle/, in present-tense and infinitive contexts. Learners at beginner stages use these two forms invariantly in both finite and non-finite contexts. The aim of this study is to investigate the choice of the invariant forms made by the learners. This is done by testing the influence of lexical aspect and input frequency. The investigation is made with concrete data from input sources. The results from both a free production task and an imitation test suggest that input frequency contributes more significantly than lexical aspect, although both factors overlap for most of the studied verbs.

Chinese noun classifiers are an obligatory category associated with nouns. Studies have shown that achieving a full understanding and good mastery of Chinese noun classifiers is difficult for both young and adult L2 learners. This study examines the learning strategies used by 30 Swedish adults for a period of two months. Their learning results are compared to 30 bilingual children's production of Chinese noun classifiers. The adult learners exhibit a normal top–down learning fashion, in which they fail to acquire the complex semantic and cognitive meanings embedded in the classifiers. The children, on the other hand, apply cognitive strategies with a bottom–up approach. The adults’ learning of classifiers lags surprisingly far behind their general level of Chinese proficiency. This study can be used as a reference for future studies on the conceptual and cognitive aspects of Chinese language acquisition by speakers whose native languages are not classifier languages.

This short communication is concerned with long object shift of reflexives in Swedish. Only 3rd person reflexives can shift across their antecedent. For some reason this is possible even if the antecedent is 1st or 2nd person as well, but certain requirements on the antecedent are necessary. This paper shows that neither a purely syntactic nor a purely semantic analysis can account for all the facts. Instead the best analysis seems to be one that makes use of Bonet's (1995) post-syntactic morphological processes: feature delinking, feature erasure and feature insertion.

This short communication is a brief extension of recent work on verb second (V2) in Scandinavian declarative clauses and a contribution to research on the relation between V2 and illocutionary force. It is argued that Swedish data present a problem for the hypothesis that a bi-conditional relation holds between the illocutionary force of an assertion and V2 word order. The relevant force, to the extent that we can identify it, appears to be available also in the absence of V2 word order. It is tentatively suggested that V2 encodes evidentiality.