It has long been recognised that at least some linguistic expressions —such as the connectives but in English and mais in French, and the particles doch in German and jo in Norwegian— function to affect the audience’s inference or reasoning processes rather than, or in addition to, provide conceptual content. There is a debate, however, whether the inference procedures triggered by these linguistic expressions function primarily to affect the audience’s recognition of the communicator’s arguments or primarily to guide the audience’s comprehension process. I discuss this question with reference to an instructive example from an advertisement in Norwegian. The advertisement is an argumentative text where the modal particle jo achieves subtle argumentational and stylistic effects that differ from those achieved by the corresponding German modal particles doch or ja. I demonstrate how the procedural semantic analyses independently developed by Berthelin & Borthen (submitted) of jo and Unger (2016a, 2016b, 2016c) of ja and doch support a pragmatic-semantic account of the argumentational effects of these particles. Although the semantics I propose for the respective particles does not directly relate to argumentation, it is specific enough to affect argumentation in predictable ways. The reason for this is that comprehension procedures and argumentation procedures closely interact in processing ostensive stimuli (such as verbal utterances) for optimal relevance.

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.

It is shown, on the basis of Swedish and French data, that expressions of distance may be raising predicates. Given a raising analysis, two interesting consequences follow: (a) One of two widely adopted hypotheses must be abandoned (the idea that an S with a filled Comp is never transparent to government, and the idea that French de and Swedish att, when introducing infinitival complements, are complementizers); (b) Raising predicates may be drawn from lexical categories other than V and A.

In Norway, there are between 10 and 15 bilingual or multilingual native speakers of Norwegian and Esperanto. This paper discusses some prosodic traits in the Esperanto spoken by one of them. The focus will be on compound stress. The speaker assigns primary stress to the penultimate syllable of words as in Standard Esperanto, including most compounds. Some of the Esperanto compounds, however, display first element primary stress, as in the Norwegian adstrate. In the current dataset, this is especially so for underived nouns. It is proposed that the Norwegian-like pattern is found in compound nouns that are formed spontaneously, while the Standard Esperanto pattern is found in lexicalised compounds, understood as prosodically simplex. For derived compounds in word classes other than nouns, the overall stress pattern is more like that of Standard Esperanto.

The topic of this paper is convergence in an asymmetrical bilingual setting, and it will be shown that the outcome of the convergence process is different in the dominant language (L1) from what it is in the receiving language (L2). In L1, there is complication of the receiving language, while there is reduction in the syntax of the L2.

In this study, we present an analysis of gender assignment tendencies in Jamtlandic, a language variety of Sweden, using a word list of 1029 items obtained from fieldwork. Most research on gender assignment in the Scandinavian languages focuses on the standard languages (Steinmetz 1985; Källström 1996; Trosterud 2001, 2006) and Norwegian dialects (Enger 2011, Kvinlaug 2011, Enger & Corbett 2012). However, gender assignment principles for Swedish dialects have not previously been researched. We find generalizations based on semantic, morphological, and phonological principles. Some of the principles apply more consistently than others, some ‘win’ in competition with other principles; a multinomial logistic regression analysis provides a statistical foundation for evaluating the principles. The strongest tendencies are those based on biological sex, plural inflection, derivational suffixes, and some phonological sequences. Weaker tendencies include non-core semantic tendencies and other phonological sequences. Gender assignment in modern loanwords differs from the overall material, with a larger proportion of nouns assigned masculine gender.

This article deals with extensions of Vygotsky's (1978) theory of learning in the zone of proximal development. First, affect is added as an additional prerequisite Wertsch's (1979) extended version of it. Then, learning in the zone of proximal development is applied to communicative development. Finally, four main levels in the development from interindividual to intraindividual functioning of communication in the child are distinguished and exemplified.

The purpose of this paper is to present an analysis of french schea deletion where, in agreemant with some basic principles of natural Generative Phonology, all rules are obligatory and not extrinsically ordered. This analysis is at variance with Dell's (1973) treatmant. It is contended that even if, as suggested by Rudes (1976), marking each phonological rule for applying only within a certain tempo can eliminate from the phonological component true optional rules, a certain amount of optionality must still be allowed within a rule. Furthermore, the nature of French schwa deletion forces us to reject rudes' model where the output of a tempo is the input to the next faster one.

The article gives an overview of a universalistic hypothesis concerning world order change. Though noting the probabilistic nature of tendencies, it presents for comparison facts from the history of a specific language, Russian. It is a matter of opinion how such facts are weighted when they seem to be rathr against than for the hypothesis. However, what hopefully emerges clearly enough is that linearity and variation in syntax are guided by intonation and information structure as much as by structural analogy.

This article examines evidentiality in the frame of inferential adverbs in written interaction from the perspective of Finnish, a language that does not have evidentiality as a grammatical category. The analysis focuses on six adverbs, such as käsittääkseni ‘as far as I understand’ and tietääkseni ‘to my knowledge, as far as I know’. Evidentiality and epistemic modality intertwine in their semantics, as these adverbs represent a writer’s access to information, but also indicate her evaluation of its reliability. First, this article offers a description of the interactional functions of these adverbs such as marking a writer’s opinion in contrasts, expressing slight hedging in order to anticipate corrections, to allow space for other opinions, or to create irony. Second, in the framework of cognitive grammar, the analysis focuses on the meaning of the evidential verb+kseni construction and the effect of different verb stems on it. These adverbs share similar functions in texts, which is due to their flexible constructional meaning. While varying from lexeme to lexeme, specific evidential and epistemic dimensions can either be foregrounded and relevant in a situation or remain backgrounded and not activated.

The notion of symbolizability is taken as the second requisite of computation (the first being ‘algorithmizability’), and it is shown that symbols, qua symbols, are not symbolizable. This has far-reaching consequences for the computational study of language and for AI-research in language understanding. The representation hypothesis is formulated, and its various assumptions and goals are examined. A research strategy for the computational study of natural language understanding is outlined.

First of all we want to thank the general editors of the Nordic Journal of Linguistics for this opportunity to present to the readers of one of the most important linguistics journals in Northern Europe some specimens of sociolinguistic research. When we were approached by the general editors, we wholeheartedly agreed that this would be a good idea, although – or rather, precisely for this reason – sociolinguists in general have not been keen on publishing in NJL in the past. We have a modest hope that the present issue will change this.

This paper explores ‘the evaluative noget construction’ in Danish. The construction consists of noget ‘something’ juxtaposed by a noun in an evaluative frame such as e.g. Det er noget pjat, ‘It’s nonsense’. With a starting point in cross-linguistic studies on something, the paper moves on to explore core members of this evaluative class in Danish, providing a detailed semantic analysis of the construction’s core configurations. The affordance of noget ‘something’ to mean ‘something bad’ is a key to understanding the construction, and from this general premise the class of evaluatives take off in multiple negative directions, providing a snapshot of the Danish linguaculture of evaluation. The paper argues for a Cultural Construction Grammar that can bring together the lexicogrammatical integrationism of construction grammar approaches with the linguacultural holism of the research in ethnosyntax. The goal is to provide high-definition analysis of complex, language-specific constructions in a simple, globally translatable metalanguage.

Two models are presented of how the listener detects words in utterances. The first model assumes that the listener takes advantage of phonetic word boundary signals (WBSs), non-phonetic information not being necessary for word detection. The second model assumes that word detection relies on the use of non-phonetic knowledge of the language, words being detected through the recognition of the preceding word. Thus WBSs may not be necessary for word detection. The WBSs suggested for Finnish are evaluated against this background. The phonotactic WBSs are found unreliable or useless, the others limited in applicability or experimentally unsupported. The models and the results of the survey will direct future investigations of word detection and recognition in Finnish.

The present study is an analysis of phonologically deviant words in the speech of a group of Norwegin patients suffering from conduction aphasia. The analysis shows that these deviations are not randomly distributed. Their distribution is such that it supports phonological thories which posit hierarchiacal structures both below and above the level of the segment. The deviations can be accounted for within a phonological theory which assumes that a word's lexical phonological representation contains a phonemic level where each phoneme consists of a set of articulatory features which are hierarchically organized with respect to each other, and which also assumes that the phonological representation contains information about the syllable structure of the word.