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.

The article deals with the possibility of constructing a synopsis of a given text by automatic means from the text itself. It is suggested that this might be done on the basis of a statistical analysis of the vocabulary and collocations in the vocabulary, followed by simple parsing of selected parts of the text, and simple textual analysis, everything based on the results of the vocabulary analysis. The sentences and sentence fragments that are found to be central can then be used for the reconstruction of a substantially abridged version of the original text. After a discussion of the background of the model, a sample analysis is shown.

This article discusses definiteness marking in two possessive constructions that exhibit special patterns (split possession) for certain kinship nouns in Norwegian. It is shown that the special patterns, whereby the relevant nouns appear without a definite suffix, are retained by the majority speakers of American Norwegian (AmNo); some AmNo speakers use them even more extensively than homeland speakers, and only a minority do not use them. The forms without the suffix are analysed as a reflex of a poss feature that is a part of the featural make-up of certain kinship nouns (Julien 2005). I argue that the most conspicuous differences in distribution of this feature in the homeland vs. the heritage variety have emerged through a combination of decline in homeland Norwegian and retention and even extension in AmNo. The development in AmNo seems to be systematic and principled; it does not involve “loss” or incompleteness (e.g., Yager et al. 2015; Kupisch & Rothman 2016; Bayram et al. 2019).

Lay participation in criminal trials has primarily been studied in common law systems, thereby mainly focusing on the separate role of juries. These studies have provided detailed accounts of language use between jurors during deliberation as well as their use of storytelling techniques and common-sense reasoning in decision-making. However, only few studies have focused on the linguistic learning processes that lay judges in other legal systems go through when they deliberate cases together with a professional judge both in reaching a verdict and in sentencing. In Denmark, lay judges are appointed for a period of four years, and this paper presents findings from an ethnographic study of lay judges and their growing experience with interactions in the deliberation room. It argues that lay judges learn to use legal language in order to strengthen their arguments vis-à-vis the professional judges. Lay judges feel that their influence is dependent on how well they master new, legal context-specific ways of expressing themselves, a point that may run counter to their legitimation as lay voices in an otherwise formalized judiciary.

Estonian conditional clauses have previously been divided into two clear-cut groups: real and unreal, with indicative and conditional main verbs of conditional clauses, respectively. This article defends the view that it is a question of the degree of hypotheticality that a sentence conveys, and it treats hypotheticality as a continuum that includes groups of linguistic forms, which have a relatively clear core and are separated by fuzzy transition areas. Secondly, the article concentrates on the relationship between Estonian conditional clauses and temporal clauses. As these clause types have the same marker (kui), the article discusses whether it is always possible to distinguish between these two clauses and which factors are relevant for determining whether the clause is a temporal or conditional one. Thirdly, the relationship between Estonian conditional and concessive clauses is under consideration, focusing particularly on Estonian scalar concessive conditional clauses.

Bound neuter i-stems in Modern Icelandic, which occur as heads of compounds in for example salanguryroi ‘slang word’, support an overgenerating model of the lexicon. Bound stems are shown to be generated as constituents at level 1 of the lexicon and combined to form compounds at level 2. Bound stems are blocked from becoming inputs to the syntax by the Avoid Synonymy principle (Kiparsky 1983), revised as a constraint on the output of the lexicon as a whole. Because Avoid Synonymy operates in lexical Logical Form, it has access to word-internal structure at each lexical level. The revised version of Avoid Synonymy is given additional support from Icelandic and English.

This paper discusses pronominal demonstratives (PDs) in homeland and heritage (American) Norwegian and Swedish. We establish a baseline approximating the language of the early emigrants, based on 19th/20th century Norwegian dialect recordings and Swedish texts. Baseline Norwegian had a fully established PD expressing psychological distance (see Johannessen 2008a). In Swedish, however, PDs do not quite behave like (distal) demonstratives: they can combine with a definite determiner or a regular demonstrative, and they do not fully have the pragmatic functions that demonstratives have. We propose that the Swedish PD is a pronoun rather than a demonstrative, without the full set of regular pronominal features, but with logophoric features that activate knowledge shared between the speaker and addressee. Data from AmNo show that PDs are preserved in this heritage language, across several generations. On the assumption that PDs are indexical and that speech act participants are represented in narrow syntax, it comes as no surprise that they are retained (Polinsky 2018:63–65), although this may, on the face of it, appear to be at odds with the Interface Hypothesis (e.g. Sorace & Filiaci 2006, Sorace 2011).

In modern Icelandic, spoken in the South, West, and North-West of Iceland, there is a phonemic opposition between voiced and voiceless nasals before stop consonants. For the present investigation the research instrument was the velograph. The purpose of the research was to investigate patterns of velar movement associated with each type of nasal consonants. The results show different types of velar movement organized according to two separate temporal patterns. For the voiceless nasals the movement of the velum is more rapid and begins earlier than for the voiced nasals. There are also significant differences in the nasalization of the preceding vowel according to whether the following nasal consonant is voiced or voiceless.

This paper reports on field work conducted during 1994 in Västra Nyland (Finland) in order to obtain independent and current documentation of the incongruent case forms in the dialect, as reported by Lundström (1939). The data collected substantiated the existence of incongruent case forms in the dialect, but the actual use of such forms could not be traced any longer. Due to this, several details in the actual use of certain incongruency types could not be clarified. The loss of case incongruency in this dialect area raises the question of how a vernacular can change such a grammatical feature. According to Emonds (1986), such losses cannot be remedied, but this is exactly the case here. The changing status of a modern Scandinavian dialect seems to be the only way to explain this change.

The Estonian indefinite pronouns keegi ‘someone’ and miski ‘something’ are distinguished by being able to refer to animate or inanimate entities, respectively. However, in certain Estonian dialects, keegi is used to refer to inanimate entities as well. The aim of this paper is to describe the functions and use of keegi based on the data in the Corpus of Estonian Dialects. We used statistical analyses to determine which dialects typically use keegi to refer to inanimate entities and which variables (polarity, function, position in the clause, case marking) contribute most to this variation. The results show that there are significant differences between the dialects: keegi is mostly used to refer to inanimate entities in the northern dialects (most frequently in the Western, Mid, and Eastern dialects), but this phenomenon is rare or non-existent in the southern dialects. All of the variables studied contribute to this variation: keegi is most likely to refer to an inanimate being when it is in the partitive case, functions as an object, a partitive subject, or a negative polarity item, and is positioned at the end of a negative clause.

Sounds spoken on the inbreath have been shown to be common in the world’s languages, and in the Nordic languages ingressive speech seems to be especially frequent. The present study focuses on Finnish and Danish response particles spoken on the inbreath, by examining their uses in everyday talk-in-interaction in corpora of recorded interactions. The particles we examine and their non-ingressive counterparts can perform confirming and acknowledging actions. We analyze the particles as receipts to answers to questions, as responses to questions, as responses to assessments, and as responses to affiliation-seeking utterances. In these positions, the ingressive particles turn out to index that the content of the previous turn was already sufficiently established and, consequently, that there is nothing to add. In cases where an engaged response is called for, the particles are shown to have a disaffiliative potential.

Danish motion verbs provide a good candidate for testing the hypothesis of semantic determination on Danish, a hypothesis most recently discussed by Levin (1993) in her description of English verb classes and alternations. A set of core meaning components for motion verbs is identified and a taxonomy of Danish motion verbs is produced. With the basic assumption that a word's meaning determines its syntactic potential, this paper gives an account of the syntactic alternations that Danish motion verbs can undergo, and exposes a more or less transparent relation between their syntax and semantics.

Taking a self-determination perspective, the present study aims at assessing how the linguistic background shapes internal and external motivation towards Finnish among young Swedish-speaking Finns. Self-report questionnaire data were collected in 2014 among students in Swedish language secondary schools in Esbo/Espoo and Raseborg/Raasepori in Finland (N = 233). The results demonstrated that bilinguals are more internally motivated towards Finnish, whereas Swedish speakers are more externally motivated towards Finnish. Furthermore, while Swedish speakers in both Swedish-dominated and Finnish-dominated localities reported the same level of external motivation, bilinguals in the Swedish-dominated locality reported higher level of external motivation than did bilinguals in the Finnish-dominated locality. These findings and their theoretical implications are discussed.

The noun phrase was long a neglected area within research in modern syntactic theory. Studies tended to focus instead on the clause and less attention was paid to the internal structure of the noun phrase. The early studies would often take an interest in the properties of noun phrases only in so far as they interacted with clausal morpho-syntax. Nominalisations were then subject to some early studies, as in Chomsky (1970) and work inspired by it.

In the double object construction (e.g. the man gave the woman some flowers) a preference has been observed for placing definite arguments before indefinite arguments when both appear post-verbally. In Danish it has been reported that examples with the indefinite–definite order are read more slowly than those with the definite–indefinite order in speeded acceptability judgement tasks, and they are less frequent in corpus texts. This short communication presents a memory recall experiment showing that the preference observed in comprehension and written production is also observed in on-line oral production. Participants produce definite–indefinite orders when attempting to recall definite–indefinite orders in 95% of the cases, but when attempting to recall indefinite–definite orders they alter the definiteness of one or both of the arguments and produce indefinite–definite orders only in 6% of the cases.