This is the first issue of volume 38 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.

The second issue of Volume 39 (autumn 2016) of the Nordic Journal of Linguistics will be a special issue devoted to discourse, grammar and intersubjectivity. This issue will be edited by Marja Etelämäki, Ilona Herlin, Tapani Möttönen and Laura Visapää.

The Danish stød, a kind of glottal prosody associated with certain syllables, as in barʔn ‘child’ (cf. stødless barnlig ‘childish’), has long been the target of intense phonological investigation. In this paper, we show that its analysis requires an understanding of the prosodic constituent structure of Danish, and of the essential role of the perfect prosodic word (coextensive with one foot). After motivating this notion on independent grounds, both in other languages and in the context of acquisition, we show that the Danish stød system, analyzed in Optimality Theory, provides a window on the workings of the perfect prosodic word, regulating the presence and absence of stød in some of the much-discussed cases in the literature. In conclusion, we discuss the status of the perfect prosodic word in the light of recent developments in phonological theory, such as Match Theory.

This paper concerns crosslinguistic differences in the acceptability of so-called relative clause extraction constructions, exemplified by the unacceptable English sentence *This boat I know the guy that owns (associated with the acceptable canonical sentence I know the guy that owns this boat). It has sometimes been argued, since Ross (1967), that such extractions are universally blocked by a syntactic constraint. However, following observations of such structures in English and other languages, some linguists have argued that such sentences have varying degrees of acceptability and that the degree of acceptability depends on attention limits and pragmatic foregroundedness/backgroundedness. Another view which appears to have gained ground in recent years is one where the degree of acceptability is directly related to processing difficulty. The analysis presented in this paper is based on a comparison between English and Swedish, and includes authentic data, examples previously discussed in the literature, as well as acceptability-tested invented sentences. In the end it will be argued that, while the dominance- and processing-based proposals are on the right track, there is a more plausible and straightforward way of explaining the observed crosslinguistic variation using the theoretical framework of Construction Grammar. Thus, an alternative account will be presented drawing on general principles which are well established within cognitive- and construction-based theories.

On the basis of data from Swedish, this paper examines the Small Clause Hypothesis (Kush & Lindahl 2011, Kush, Omaki & Hornstein 2013) proposed to account for relative clause (RC) extractions in Mainland Scandinavian. The hypothesis predicts that extraction possibilities differ for relative clauses in the complement of verbs which select and verbs which do not select a small clause (SC), and that the possibility of RC extraction hinges on the ability of the matrix verb to select SCs involving the predicational operator som. I report results from an acceptability judgment experiment on RC extraction in Swedish manipulating three conditions: (a) SC-selecting verbs compatible with som, (b) SC-selecting verbs incompatible with som, and (c) verbs that are incompatible with SCs. The results show no significant difference between these conditions, thus offer no support in favor of the Small Clause Hypothesis. Additional problems are posed by the possibility of extraction from object RCs and by extraction possibilities in the absence of som.

This paper provides evidence for the idea that relaxed verb-second (V2) languages exist and exhibt specific properties which distinguish them from both strict V2 and non-V2 languages. The identification of the relaxed subtype of V2 languages implies that V2 should not be understood as a linear restriction, but as an abstract rule involving the movement of the finite verb to a head of the left periphery in all main clauses.