Neurolinguistics, the study of language representations and processes in the human brain, is at the crossroads of fields of science such as linguistics, psychology, neuropsychology, and neurology. The present survey starts with a historical outline and continues with a review of recent studies on mental lexicon and syntax in aphasia. Those studies support the psychological reality of certain linguistic distinctions. We finish by mentioning some future trends in neurolinguistics.

Keyword analysis has been used to investigate properties of style and genre, as a tool in discourse analysis, and as a method of identifying differences between the speech of distinct social groups. It has often been criticised as a blunt tool which can exaggerate what differences are present and fails to distinguish between quite distinct phenomena. However, it remains a very powerful tool for wide analysis of systematic differences between corpora when used with sufficient scepticism. This paper uses keyword analysis to examine differences between the speech of male and female characters in the Íslendingasögur, narrative prose texts composed in Iceland in the 13th and 14th centuries. This dataset is of particular interest because such representations of speech are the only window on the language of social groups who were not involved in text production in medieval societies. It aims to demonstrate a rigorous application of keyword analysis, exemplifying what it can and, crucially, what it cannot show.

In this paper, I will present an empirical study on the use of the temporal adverbs nú and núna ‘now’ in Icelandic talk-in-interaction. The aim is to investigate whether the two words have different functions, and, if so, to describe these differences. As I will show, nú and núna show clear differences in respect to their syntactical distribution. Furthermore, I will argue, that the syntactic distribution also reflects differences on the functional level. While núna occurs in the end field and has a clear referential function, nú tends to occur in the front field and have closer ties to the finite verb. The theoretical and methodological framework for the study is interactional linguistics, and the data comprises my transcription of around fourteen hours of conversation.

There are basically three ways in which the reference of a token of the English proximal spatial indexical here and corresponding terms in other languages can be resolved in the context-dependent, pragmatic phase of the addressee's determination of the propositional content of an utterance that contains this adverbial adjunct. ‘Here’ may refer reflexively to the place of utterance, including minimally the spot occupied by the speaker (token-reflexive reference), it may be anaphoric upon a discourse antecedent that provides information necessary for identification of the referent (anaphoric reference), or resolution of the reference depends on information derived from processing of a perceptual stimulus (deictic reference). These three pragmatic paths to resolution of the reference of proximal spatial indexicals are not mutually exclusive, so they do not warrant postulation of lexical ambiguity, at least not the traditional kind of ambiguity based on differences in conceptual meaning.

The article describes the process of creating a Finnish language FrameNet or FinnFN, based on the original English language FrameNet hosted at the International Computer Science Institute in Berkeley, California. We outline the goals and results relating to the FinnFN project and especially to the creation of the FinnFrame corpus. The main aim of the project was to test the universal applicability of frame semantics by annotating real Finnish using the same frames and annotation conventions as in the original Berkeley FrameNet project. From Finnish newspaper corpora, 40,721 sentences were automatically retrieved and manually annotated as example sentences evoking certain frames. This became the FinnFrame corpus. Applying the Berkeley FrameNet annotation conventions to the Finnish language required some modifications due to Finnish morphology, and a convention for annotating individual morphemes within words was introduced for phenomena such as compounding, comparatives and case endings. Various questions about cultural salience across the two languages arose during the project, but problematic situations occurred only in a few examples, which we also discuss in the article. The article shows that, barring a few minor instances, the universality hypothesis of frames is largely confirmed for languages as different as Finnish and English.

Language for all is a method developed in the Netherlands for providing information in such a way that as many intended readers as possible both comprehend and accept this information. Readers include people with a large variety of reading abilities including people with low literacy skills. Language for all can be characterized as a more accessible variant of plain language with some characteristics of easy language.

In three studies the comprehension and acceptance of and preference for texts written in Language for all was evaluated, comparing original texts with a version in Language for all.

Information written in Language for all was significantly better understood and accepted, and was preferable to the original version.

In conclusion, Language for all is a promising effective, inclusive, and comprehensive method to provide information to people with and without low literacy skills. Further research is recommended.

In Norwegian, the verb få ‘get, receive’ differs from all other verbs with respect to its use in imperative sentences and with respect to control properties in infinitival clauses. In the imperative, the deleted subject may be first person, and in clauses embedded after ‘ask’, få has unambiguous subject control. These syntactic facts are related to the lexical semantic properties of the verb få, and it is shown that this syntactic behavior is not due to some idiosyncratic peculiarity of this particular verb. The semantic properties of this and other Norwegian verbs account for the uniqueness of få in this respect.

This paper critically reviews S. J. Keyser and Paul Kiparsky's “Syllable Structure in Finnish Phonology” (1984). We also treat Finnish morphophonemics using a CV-tier analysis, but account for forms that their method fails on. We posit six stem types in the verbal lexicon and derive the forms of all inflections of all types with just twelve morphophonemic rules. After the stems are modified and suffixes (and person/number endings) are attached, a single, general, phonological rule of Consonant Gradation applies postlexically. To develop a general theory from our analysis, we consider restrictions on rules which may alter stems: lexical rules apply to stems before affixation and only to the final segments of stems; only post-lexical phonological rules apply to affixes. We eliminate all morphological conditions on individual rules and extrinsic ordering conditions.

This paper presents a usage-based cognitive approach to the different rates at which Icelandic masculine forms in nominative/accusative plural -ur are reanalysed as feminine. Of the 14.92% of nouns in plural -ur, 91.89% are feminine, others masculine. Syncretism in nominative/accusative plural is exceptionless among feminines, but relatively rare among masculines. Interestingly, plurals such as masculine eigendur ‘owners’, fætur ‘feet’, vetur ‘winters’ occasionally yield the feminine outputs definite eigendur-nar, fætur-nar, vetur-nar, and are sometimes modified by feminine forms of adjectives and determiners. As the full set of forms in plural -ur is highly schematic, we might expect reanalysis – viewed as a property of a schema’s productivity – to correlate proportionately with the frequency of corresponding masculine forms. However, corpus data for Icelandic betray a mismatch. Through a network model approach that emphasises prototype structure, minimal schematicity is shown to impact the rate of reanalysis by means of a gang effect.

Alternating Dat-Nom/Nom-Dat verbs in Icelandic are notorious for instantiating two diametrically opposed argument structures: the Dat-Nom and the Nom-Dat construction. We conduct a systematic study of the relevant verbs to uncover the factors steering the alternation. This involves a comparison of 15 verbs, five alternating ones, and as a control, five Nom-Dat verbs and five non-alternating Dat-Nom verbs. Our findings show that alternating verbs instantiate the Nom-Dat construction 54% of the time and the Dat-Nom construction 46% of the time on average for four of five verbs when both arguments are full NPs. However, in configurations with a nominative pronoun, the Nom-Dat construction takes precedence over the Dat-Nom construction. Also, for the double-NP configuration, a logistic regression analysis identifies indefiniteness and length as two key predictors, apart from nominative case marking. We demonstrate that the latter systematically correlates with discourse-prominence, which we show, upon closer inspection, correlates with topicality.

This article introduces the Finnish Corpus of Online Registers (FinCORE) representing the full range of registers – situationally defined text varieties such as news and blogs – on the Finnish Internet. The extreme range of language use found online has challenged the study of registers. It has been unclear what registers the entire Internet includes, and if they can be sufficiently defined to allow for their analysis or classification, previous studies focusing on restricted sets of registers and English. FinCORE features 10,754 texts from the unrestricted web, manually annotated for their register using a scheme originally established for the Corpus of Online Registers of English (CORE). We present the FinCORE registers and compare them to CORE. Finally, we show that the FinCORE registers are sufficiently well-defined to allow for their automatic identification, thus opening novel possibilities for both linguistics and web-as-corpus research. FinCORE is published under an open license.

The speech perception ability of people with hearing loss can be efficiently measured using phonemic-level scoring. We aimed to develop linguistic stimuli suitable for a closed-set phonemic discrimination test in the Swedish language called the Situated Phoneme (SiP) test. The SiP test stimuli that we developed consisted of real monosyllabic words with minimal phonemic contrast, realised by phonetically similar phones. The lexical and sublexical factors of word frequency, phonological neighbourhood density, phonotactic probability, and orthographic transparency were similar between all contrasting words. Each test word was recorded five times by two different speakers, including one male and one female. The accuracy of the test-word recordings was evaluated by 28 normal-hearing subjects in a listening experiment with a silent background using a closed-set design. With a few exceptions, all test words could be correctly discriminated. We discuss the results in terms of content- and construct-validity implications for the Swedish SiP test.

In this article it is demonstrated how verbal and non-verbal expressions, i.e. speech and gestures, interact to convey social and cognitive information in an excerpt taken from a conversational discussion. The theoretical framework for the article is that of information processing. Within this framework, verbal and non-verbal expressions in the conversation are characterized as discourse operations which develop and refine information in a generative search in analogy with an AI production system. The discourse operations function as underspecified instructions that in interaction with given information states generate new information states in search of a desired information state.

A connectionist back-propagation net is trained to learn a mapping between verb forms (infinitive, imperative, present tense) and past tense forms. A back-propagation network requires that a one-to-one mapping exists between input and output. Since Swedish past tense is characterized by choice between weak and strong forms this proves a hard task for the net. Examples are: nypte/nöp ‘pinched’, tvang/tvingade ‘forced’, where there is no obvious reason for preferring one form over the other. The task is still worth doing since regularities emerge in the net over time. The performance of the connectionist model is analysed and compared to previous results.

The article discusses two types of discourse coherence, propositional coherence and interactional coherence. These two types are related to the mode of discourse as well as to the level of style in the discourse. It takes up the concept of frame as an organised subsystem of knowledge shared by human beings, and suggests ways in which this concept could be used in studies of coherence in everyday conversations, prose texts and lyrical poetry. The article also suggests a way of describing discourse coherence in terms of the discourse topic and considers the relationship of the two types in different kinds of texts.