Despite many attempts, we do not yet know how to answer the question exhaustively and adequately: What is common Danish stød phonetically? Specifically, is there an underlying physiological constancy behind the considerable acoustic variability? And is there a common denominator to the different acoustic manifestations that might explain their perceptual equivalence? Systematic acoustic, physiological, and perceptual investigations of common Danish stød now span (a little more than) three quarters of a century. This is a review of that research, to determine what may be considered established phonetic facts about common Danish stød and the open questions that remain for future research.

Most modern studies of Swedish phonology take the view that the underlying vowel inventory of Central Standard Swedish comprises nine, rather than seventeen or eighteen, mutually contrasting vowel phonemes. A residual problem of a classic phonological type concerns the borrowed entities, rendered in traditional Swedish orthography as au and eu, whose ‘status in the vowel system is unclear’ (Riad 2014:42). The present paper scrutinizes earlier and current phonological interpretations of these entities, adduces evidence for and against each proposal, and concludes that the case for treating them as phonemic diphthongs /V͡V/, as /VC/-sequences, or as monosyllabic /VV̯/-sequences is weak and that they should in the first place be viewed as underlying heterosyllabic vowel sequences /VV/, subject to a special phonological stipulation valid for a borrowed sub-domain of the lexicon. Typologically, Central Standard Swedish should continue to be subsumed under the category of languages that lack phonological diphthongs.

This article discusses different transcription systems and models of sign language phonology that fall into two major categories: The innovative work of Stokoe, with later adaptations from different European countries on one hand, and on the other, several autosegmental models. The focus in the discussion is how these different models deal with hand orientation and specification of movement directionality. On the basis of this discussion, features and concepts for a new model are proposed.

This paper explores the possibilities of modelling and simulating the early phases in child language acquisition using neural networks. A back-propagation model is proposed for language acquisition in a highly inflecting language, Finnish. Some preliminary tests for simulating the U-shaped behaviour of a child's language acquisition process have been performed.

This special issue of Nordic Journal of Linguistics is dedicated to the emerging field of forensic linguistics. There are competing definitions and delimitations of this term but here we will use it to refer to the investigation and elucidation of language evidence in a legal context. This includes the scrutiny of language data from different stages of the legal process, ranging from emergency calls to police interviews and courtroom interaction, as well as expert assessment and witness testimony in cases where the meaning or authorship of texts or utterances are questioned. While the analysis of authentic case data is often preferred or even required, access to such highly sensitive data types is naturally restricted by legal and ethical boundaries. An increasing amount of studies therefore employ experimental designs to test hypotheses and improve methodologies.

This paper analyses phenomena of argument reduction with dative and reflexive clitics, as well as clitic doubling, in Bulgarian, arguing that both types of phenomena reflect values of what we call the Completedness Parameter, a cross-linguistically attested parameter involving a combination of diathesis and aspectual properties. For the representation of values relevant to this parameter, we introduce the construct of a (propositional) GESTALT, understood as follows: the gestalt of a sentence S is a conceptual model of the “situation-in-the-world” referred to by S, reflecting the perspective on this situation imposed by S, and aspectual and other properties induced by S.

This article compares three accounts of Finnish intonation using a perception experiment with manipulated f0 contours. The experiment involved compound/noun phrase minimal pairs differing in f0 pattern. To address the question of tonal specification, manipulations changed f0 contours of recorded compound words, associating them with f0 patterns having different components of the naturally occurring f0 rise-fall contour. Thus, the study investigated which tonal targets were crucial for the perception of a complete tonal contour inducing a noun phrase interpretation. Results suggested that the falling part of the rise-falls, modelled as realisations of a high and a following low target, was essential. They furthermore revealed evidence for these targets being associated with prosodic phrases, as well as for Finnish tonal targets being characterised by a flexibility that contrasts with accent realisations in languages like English.

The fact that a lexeme can appear in various forms causes problems in information retrieval. As a solution to this problem, we have developed methods for automatic root lemmatization, automatic truncation and automatic splitting of compound words. All the methods have as their basis a set of rules which contain information regarding inflected and derived forms of words – and not a dictionary. The methods have been tested on several collections of texts, and have produced very good results. By controlled experiments in text retrieval, we have studied the effects on search results. These results show that both the method of automatic root lemmatization and the method of automatic truncation make a considerable improvement on search quality. The experiments with splitting of compound words did not give quite the same improvement, however, but all the same this experiment showed that such a method could contribute to a richer and more complete search request.

Swedish grammatical gender is challenging for Finnish-speaking learners of Swedish due to its abstract meaning, the complex nature of Swedish NPs and the low salience of the morphology used to mark gender. Our study compares the expression of gender in texts written in Swedish by Finnish-speaking 12- and 15-year-old immersion students with that of 16-year-old non-immersion students. The results show that NPs with gender agreement, i.e. those with several morphemes marking gender, are more difficult than NPs with only one marker. In all informant groups, uter is significantly easier than neuter, but uter is also overused, as approximately 75% of all Swedish nouns are uter in modern Swedish. Comparisons between different informant groups show that non-immersion students often reach a significantly higher level of accuracy than immersion students, which indicates that formal teaching has a positive effect.

Situated in Southeast Asia, Singapore’s sociolinguistic situation has undergone several changes due to active language planning policies, with English and Mandarin becoming the two socio-politically majority languages in Singapore society. Over time, this has led to the restricted usage of various non-Mandarin dialects, including Teochew, both in public settings and within the home. This paper examines how Teochew, a heritage language in Singapore, has been affected in its vocabulary usage in apparent time. The data was collected from 41 Teochew male and female speakers aged 12–86 years. This paper contributes theoretically by showing the properties of a heritage language, Singapore Teochew, in an environment with multiple shifts of several major languages in Southeast Asia, instead of the more common situation of one major language shift.

Representative sets of software systems for computational morphology are evaluated as candiates for a general morphological program module in the context of computer-aided word class tagging. They are considered as both programming tools and representations of linguistic Knowledge. The systems, which are found to be relatively neutral with respect to linguistic theory, can be grouped into a general-purpose and a special-purpose type. Pattern matching in them is described as a high-level feature applied to the computational treatment of phenomena characteristic of morphological analysis: lexical lookup, morphotactics, and morphophonemic alternation. The systems are found to perform similarly in simple applications, but significantly differently in more complicated ones where integrated and well-structured solutions are sought.

Through a critical exposition of the essential literature on the concept of “subject” in Danish it is demonstrated that the subject properties which are put forward there — and which are related to different levels of description: phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics — are mutually incongruous. We argue that it is only possible to define the subject as a collection of features drawn from several levels. On the basis of the feature collection which we postulate the problem “subject as sentence constituent” is incorporated into the valency model, and in this connection a distinction is made between the abstract valency-conditioned entity and its realization in given sentence patterns. Sentence constituents are entities which can be defined only for sentence patterns.

Some structural similarities between English and the Polynesian language Tokelau are investigated, especially regarding the multifunctionality of linguistic forms. Observations are made with respect to the relative distribution of overt processes and conversion, and it is argued that conversion should be regarded as a negatively defined cover notion for all cross-categorial lexical processes that do not involve formal modification of the input. The similarities with respect to the inventory and patterning of word-formational processes are motivated by certain similarities in the morphological type of the two languages.

This study is a semantic and pragmatic analysis of the Norwegian right-detached particle så, which occurs exclusively with sentence fragments. The framework of description is relevance theory, a cognitively based theory of communication whose objective is to account for how we are able to understand utterances and to make ourselves understood, in spite of the fact that the linguistic code that we use vastly underdetermines what we mean, and even what we say in the strict sense (truth conditions). It is argued that så encodes a procedure for the addressee to follow in his inferential processing of the linguistic signal. The lexical entry for så contains an instruction to the addressee to contextually activate one or more positive propositions which resemble the one asserted by the utterance of the så-fragment, and to arrange them mentally on a scale whose lower bound is represented by the så-fragment proposition. The speaker implicitly communicates her lack of commitment to the more highly ranked propositions on the scale. The principle behind the scalar ranking is argued to be highly context-dependent.

For both of the two Danish construction han sidder og sover “he sits and sleeps” and han kom gående “he came walking (along)”, it has been suggested that the second verb is governed by the first in the same way as a main verb is governed by an auxiliary or modal verb. Specifically, this would imply that the second verb is located in the non-finite verb slot in the topological sentence pattern. It is shown that these suggestions are not justified and that the Danish verbal constructions only allow infinitives and past participles as verbal complements of another verb.

This paper discusses Finnish depictive and resultative secondary predicates. The analysis is based on a condition of licensing which can be seen as a version of the principle of Full Interpretation: “A well-formed syntactic structure is licensed only if it can be linked to a well-formed conceptual structure.” The suggested non-trivial theory of the interface between syntax and semantics allows us to avoid unnecessary complexity in syntax, such as small clause and PRO, in secondary predicate adjuncts.

This paper describes a system for automatic sentence synthesis (or “generation”) from semantic representations. The system is implemented in Interlisp as an extension of D-PATR, Lauri Karttunen's environment for the development of unification-based grammars (see Karttunen 1986, Carlson & Linden 1987).

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.

The prescriptive infinitive can be found in the North Germanic languages, is very old, and yet is largely unnoticed and undescribed. It is used in a very limited pragmatic context of a pleasant atmosphere by adults towards very young children, or towards pets or (more rarely) adults. It has a set of syntactic properties that distinguishes it from the imperative: Negation is pre-verbal, subjects are pre-verbal, subjects are third person and are only expressed by lexical DPs, not personal pronouns. It can be found in modern child language corpora, but probably originated before ad 500. The paper is largely descriptive, but some theoretical solutions to the puzzles of this construction are proposed.