The paper discusses the historical origin, present day distribution and prosodic status of preaspiration in Icelandic. Having developed as a movement of the openness of the glottis, originally a feature of “hard” stops, towards the nucleus of the stressed syllable, its distribution must be accounted for by a “segmental” rule operating on historical (underlying) hard stops. Its status with respect to length and stress is, however, shown to be that of a prosody of the nucleus of the Modern Icelandic syllable, since it carries length when the syllable is stressed. The development of preaspiration is seen as a part of a more general rule also responsible for voiceless sonorants and fricatives in the nucleus.

The present paper deals with the syntactic status of the indefinite NP in Norwegian existential-presentative constructions with a formal subject det in a typological perspective. It is argued that the NP in question is identifiable as a syntactic object both on account of its behaviour and control properties and its coding properties. Moreover, this analysis parallels Itkonen's description of “existential subjects” in Finnish as belonging to an “inverted ergative system”, which is clearly relationally different from the two kinds of ergativity systems described elsewhere in the literature.

This paper presents possible evidence from Apachean English for the existence of state/nonstate and punctual/nonpunctual distinctions as theorized in Bickerton's bioprogram concept. In addition, it is pointed out that bioprogram characteristics may surface in contact situations other than classic creoles.

In this paper, I have shown that Joshi's (1982) framework of codeswitching constraints can largely be applied to Swedish-English code-switches. I feel qualified to conclude that Joshi's claims concerning the non-switchability of closed class items and matrix language and embedded languages are held up by the Swedish- English data. The need for corresponding categories proved to be less clear-cut than originally proposed by Woolford (1983) and others. It seems that optimal switching conditions are given if the categories, rules and metarules correspond in the two languages. Apparently, however, it is also possible to switch if the node admissibility conditions for the matrix language only are met, as was shown by code-switched sentences containing RPs. This requires that the speaker has a clear sense of which language is the host and which is embedded. Rules from the embedded language only are not acceptable. This calls for some sort of determination strategy by the parser. I found no evidence for determining Lm at any specific point in the sentence, except at the topmost S. Rather, the judgments by code-switchers that a sentence “comes from” one language seems to coincide with the fact that the resulting sentence is based on the rules from that language. Other than that, the matrix language is determined by the communicative context as a whole.

The data involving RPs also seemed to indicate that RPs are not separate ategories, but are NPs, introduced by a “de-slashing” rule (Sells 1984). If they were separate categories, this would be evidence for there being no need for category equivalence. In this case, we would have to explicitly state all other cases which require category equivalence (the majority of cases), which is undesirable.

This paper attempts to combia a theoretical model of analysis with the empirical findings from a case study concerning shift. It seems that the process of language shift ought to be studied from an ecological point of view considering different levels of explanation. In the case of the Swedishpeaking minority in Finland, a description confined to the societal level would imply that the minority holds a secure position. On the other hand it is clear that certain subgroups within the minority shift to Finish. The results from a case study suggest that every miniority memeber occupies a key position in the process of language shift. Every attempt to save a language should therefore start with the bilingual individual.