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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

The Icelandic palatalisation of velar plosives has been used in several recent studies as evidence in the continuing search for an adequate model of phonology. Limitations of the naturalness of the rule in the modern language have led to suggestions that it is no longer a phonological but rather a morphonological process. The present paper reviews in some detail the status of the rule against a background of other phonological and morphological regularities in Modern Icelandic. It is concluded that while not every instance of a palatal consonant must necessarily be derived from an underlying velar, the evidence for the rule is overwhelming. The separation of phonological and morphonological rules is critically examined in the light of the Icelandic data and rejected; its untenability is further strengthened by the history of the rule. It is argued that while mechanical phonetic tendencies play a role in the rise of innovations, their entrenchment in the phonology of a language is not bound by such considerations. In effect phonological rules must always be to a greater or lesser extent unnatural.

The machine translation project Eurotra is described as a multilanguage modular translation system with 9 monolingual analysis modules, 72 bilingual transfer modules, and 9 monolingual synthesis modules. The analysis module for Danish is described as a three-step parser with structure generation rules for immediate constituent structure, syntactic structure, and semantic structure, and translation rules between them. The topological grammatical description of Danish proposed by Paul Diderichsen, is shown to be useful in building the parser for Danish, especially with respect to the interaction between empty slots and filled slot in the topological pattern. Lastly, the special problem with parsing and disambiguation of sentences that allow many pp attachments patterns is mentioned and a solution is suggested.

Our paper is a report on the past, current and future state of the endangered Pite Saami language (aka: Arjeplog Saami) spoken in Swedish Lapland. Our primary data come from interviews with Pite Saami individuals and our field observations. We estimate the vitality of Pite Saami based on the UNESCO Language Vitality Scale, taking into consideration factors such as the number of speakers, language attitudes and the quality of documentation. We also discuss the possible reasons for the decline of Pite Saami, report on the speakers’ views of other Saami languages and Swedish, consider whether there is a specific Pite Saami identity, describe revitalization efforts already taking place, and discuss the future prospects of the language.

English some and Swedish någon have a number of ‘subidentificational’ meanings, as in English some general (or other) has been shot; it was some shooting (or something). This paper reviews those meanings and attempts to determine how many context-invariant meanings are needed in order to account for their full range of meanings in context. By explicitly setting out processes of inference generation within a Gricean framework, it is found that for a large number, only one underlying (i.e. coded) meaning is required, which in context generates inferences such as lack of speaker knowledge, recall or interest in the NP referent, regarding either its type or which entity it is. Nevertheless, not all meanings can be handled in this way and additional coded meanings are required. Two diachronic pathways are discussed via which one coded meaning might extend to another. Some conclusions relevant for future work on indefinites are drawn.

The Scandinavian languages are very closely related but also vary syntactically in interesting ways, making this family useful in the study of typology variation. In this paper the issue of non-local reflexives, or ‘long-distance reflexives’ (LDR) is investigated. New LDR data from the Scandinavian languages is presented to show that the Binding Conditions cannot account for the variation in LDR in these languages, since the range of domains that LDR may or may not occur in in each variety varies non-hierarchically. For instance, LDR in Icelandic may be bound out of a finite complement clause but not out of a relative clause, while the reverse is true in most Norwegian dialects. Faroese allows LDR out of both clause types, but many dialects do not allow a second person pronoun to co-occur in a sentence containing LDR, which does not generally affect Icelandic or Norwegian LDR. An extension of Dalrymple's (1993) typology of anaphora, which is set within the framework of Lexical-Functional Grammar, can account for this data, using a combination of inside-out and outside-in functional uncertainty equations, on- and off-path constraints and positive and negative constraints, all of which refer to elements (potentially) found in functional-structure.

The paper investigates the use of PPs, specifically prepositions and the case marking on their DP arguments, in moribund North American (heritage) Icelandic (NAmIce), using data from a map task experiment. Since prepositional phrases combine semantic properties with morpho-syntactic properties, PPs allow us to investigate the relative vulnerability of both domains at once. Our results show that while the prepositional inventory of NAmIce is not reduced as compared to Modern Icelandic, the choice of prepositions is subject to crosslinguistic influence from the dominant language English. For case, we find an increase in the use of nominative and accusative case at the expense of the dative; prepositions may take over case functions too. Our results are in line with previous research on case in heritage languages as well as studies on language change, while partially contradicting the assumption that loss is reversely related to acquisition.

The focus of my analysis is the so-called existential construction. The languages examined are English, Swedish and Icelandic. The present article assumes the perspective of Ronald W. Langacker's cognitive grammar as the theoretical background. First of all, the assumption is that the unstressed, initial pronoun there, or its Scandinavian equivalents, are semantically definable as abstract-setting subjects of their respective sentences, with, possibly, the exception of Icelandic það. Secondly, the conceptualization of the existential scenes in the three languages is a dynamic process in each case. The dynamicity of the semantics of existential scenes is the result of assuming two planes, the actual and a virtual one, and establishing correspondences between them. The actual plane reflects our direct apprehension of reality. A virtual plane consists in the dynamic re-assignment of roles to the actual elements introduced by means of the virtual abstract-setting subject.

The focus of this article is on OKAY as a resource for regulating language and constructing norm centres in authentic consultation meetings related to academic writing and recorded in Finland and Sweden. It gives an overview of all occurrences of OKAY in the interactional data in question, revealing that the word occurs frequently in academic writing consultations in Finnish, Finland Swedish, and Sweden Swedish. There are similarities in the frequency of its use and the distribution of occurrences between counsellor and student in the Finnish and the Finland-Swedish data, whereas the Sweden-Swedish counselling interactions follow a slightly different pattern. Through the lens of conversation analysis and systemic–functional linguistics, we further demonstrate how the counsellors and the students use the evaluative content word OKAY as a resource for regulating both academic writing and the counselling interaction, and thereby position themselves epistemically and orient towards different centres of norms.

This article examines the Finnish tail construction (right dislocation) used as a first mention of a referent and the variation of the demonstrative pronouns tämä ‘this’, tuo ‘that’, and se ‘it’ in the construction. Many previous studies have suggested that tail construction (TC) referents are highly active and thus already mentioned and salient in a conversation. However, in Finnish, the TC may introduce new referents into a conversation, and this article provides an empirical analysis of how and why this is done. First-mention TCs are often evaluations or questions in which the proposition links the utterance to the preceding context. When presenting new information, the TC allows the speaker to present a potentially lengthy lexical definition of a new referent at the end of the utterance, avoiding the additional emphatic meanings or unwanted implications a simply inverted word order might create.