The new forms of written online communication offer a great resource for researchers interested in language variation and use, but more large-scale systematic research into the nature of the data is needed. For instance, Swedish blog data is often described as more informal and spoken in nature than traditional edited written material but overall systematic comparisons are lacking. This short communication contributes systematic comparisons between blog data and spoken and written registers by comparing measures such as type/token ratios and word frequencies. Type/token ratios of blog texts are found to lie between those for interactive speech and formal edited writing, whereas the distribution of words from different frequency bands is closer to the written material. Comparison of the ten most frequent word forms indicates that blog data resembles formal edited writing from a structural perspective, but also suggests that further studies into features of personal involvement may provide additional insights.

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.

It has been reported that speakers of Danish understand more Swedish than vice versa. One reason for this asymmetry might be that spoken Swedish is closer to written Danish than vice versa. We hypothesise that literate speakers of Danish use their orthographic knowledge of Danish to decode spoken Swedish. To test this hypothesis, first-language (L1) Danish speakers were confronted with spoken Swedish in a translation task. Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were elicited to study the online brain responses during decoding operations. Results showed that ERPs to words whose Swedish pronunciation was inconsistent with the Danish spelling were significantly more negative-going than ERPs to words whose Swedish pronunciation was consistent with the Danish spelling between 750 ms and 900 ms after stimulus onset. Together with higher word-recognition scores for consistent items, our data provide strong evidence that online activation of L1 orthography enhances word recognition of spoken Swedish in literate speakers of Danish.

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.

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.

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.

Shortly after arriving in Copenhagen five years ago, I realized what many linguists have long understood: the case situation in the Nordic languages is formidably complex. Of course, the broad outlines of inter-speaker (or, cross-linguistic) variation in Nordic nominal case inflection are well known. Within two major language families, (North) Germanic and Uralic, there are dozens of closely related language varieties. The Finnic and Sami languages of Uralic have adpositional case systems, while the North Germanic languages can be further subdivided into the Mainland and Insular groups, partially on the basis of their different case systems. The latter group, namely Icelandic, Faroese, and Älvdalian (which is spoken in a fairly isolated rural community in the interior of Sweden), has ‘rich’ inflectional case morphology on a range of elements comprising nominal phrases, including articles, determiners, demonstratives, nouns, pronouns, wh-words, and more. The former group, namely Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish, are ‘case-poor’, maintaining only a vestige of their historically rich case morphology on a subset of personal pronouns, which have Nominative, Oblique, and Possessive forms. Furthermore, certain varieties of Swedish and Norwegian retain vestigial Dative forms of clitic pronouns.

The Government-Binding theory cannot account for reflexives in Slavic languages. We may guess that the more a language differs from English with its quite rigid word-order, the worse are the predictions made by the theory.

One cannot exclude Slavic reflexives as non-anaphors in a non-arbitrary way while keeping the spirit of Chomsky et al. The Slavic reflexives behave “as they ought to” in tensed clauses, too. An attempt to exclude them would also be another step on the self-destructive path that started by excluding the Japanese reflexives in order to cope with the facts clashing with the Government-Binding theory. Many interesting cases of English reflexives would also have to be ignored for the sake of the theory.

This paper presents a detailed analysis of the behavior of the Icelandic conjunction enda. It turns out to be possible to explain all the puzzling facts about this conjunction by reinterpreting the traditional division between coordination and subordination by breaking it up into two binary features, [±CO] and [±SUB]. Furthermore, it is argued that this approach gives support for the analysis of Icelandic sentence structure proposed in Rögnvaldsson (1984) and elaborated in Thráinsson (1984, 1986).

An interesting restriction on Norwegian identity-of-sense anaphoric reference when the anaphor occurs as second object is discussed. Fretheim (1974) proposed to account for this by a global rule constraining pronominalization in such contexts, and claimed that the necessity of this constraint renders any interpretive account of identity-of-sense anaphoric reference untenable. The present paper purports to demonstrate the contrary, that Fretheim's observations in fact provide support for an interpretive theory of identify-of-sense anaphora as far as Norwegian is concerned.

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.

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.

This article examines the semantic structure of the Norwegian preposition mot ‘towards, against’, and suggests an analysis within cognitive semantics where it is argued that the various senses of this word are best accounted for in terms of a family resemblance category, with two interrelated image schemas, SOURCE-PATH-GOAL and FORCE DYNAMICS, as its basic senses. Other senses are treated as extensions, for the most part metaphorical, of these two basic senses. The study builds on a corpus of Norwegian texts from various genres.

Written Norwegian has two words, the co-ordinating conjunction og and the infinitive marker å, both of which are pronounced [o] in Spoken Norwegian. In this paper, an attempt is made to show that [o] in Spoken Norwegian constitutes a single polysemous word. Furthermore, it is argued that Spoken Norwegian [o], in all its usages and meanings, is a descendant of Old Norse ok “and”, while the Old Norse infinitive marker at has not survived in Spoken Norwegian.