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.

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.

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.

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.

Please contact the Review Editor if you are interested in writing a review, or a book notice, on any of the works mentioned below, or on any other publication.