During the last decade, generative linguists have tried various ways of building phonetic naturalness into the phonological evaluation measure. The phonological component being a mental reality, it is, however, not reasonable to give reference to physical phonetic properties such a prominent place. A return to more formal principles, such as the economy criterion originally suggested by Chomsky and Halle, might be better. Many morphophonemic alternations are not synchronically natural (in the phonetic sense) at all, but only seem so because they have preserved traits from their historically phonetic origin. This is demonstrated here for two seemingly natural rules in Faroese, Velar Softening and Hiatus Insertion. In all Faroese dialects, morphological simplification has burdened the rules with exceptions, but the rules have nowhere spread to new forms so as to become exceptionless again, as would be expected from a phonetically natural rule. In closing, the role of perceptional ease as a factor in language change is discussed.

A generative account of stress and accent in Swedish is developed. Contrary to traditional assumptions, Accent I and Accent II are not considered primitive categories, nor, as in earlier generative treatments, a feature of words. Rather, the accents are described in terms of universal features of pitch, which are assigned to words whose stress patterns are fully determined. Although the pitch rules differ from one dialect to another, the stress rules are substantially the same in all dialects.

“Attributive expansion” renders directly the Norwegian term “attributiv sperring”, which has been used by grammarians to designate the syntactic construction exemplified by de for arbeiderne mest påtrengende spørsmål (the for the labourers most urgent questions) Owing its existence to German influence this construction is infrequent in Norwegian to-day, and grammarians have characterized it as completely obsolete. An examination of various kinds of Norwegian reveals, however, that it still exists, in writing and orally. The surface appearance of the construction is analysed on hte basis of examples selected from an excerpted material, and the construction is compared with its chief alternative, which consists of the head and a relative clause. some acceptability condition are assessed