This article presents a corpus-based investigation of the motivations behind the use of the s-passive and the bli-passive in contemporary written Swedish. Following a probabilistic approach to language variation and building on observations in the literature, we examine the simultaneous effects of semantic and syntactic factors by means of a multivariate statistical analysis. Our corpus sample includes 1,197 passive sentences of three Swedish verbs, which alternate in their use of the passive (acceptera ‘accept’, behandla ‘treat’ and välja ‘choose’). The results suggest that the choice of passive form is significantly associated with five predictor variables: Subject Animacy, Subject Number, Modal Verb, Av-phrase (‘by’-phrase) and Aktionsart. Among these, Subject Animacy and Modal Verb appear to yield the strongest impact effect on the choice of passive form. The study adds to earlier research in that it allows for a more accurate analysis of the simultaneous effect and relative strength of each factor on the speaker's choice of one of the passive forms.

Turkish expresses adverbial subordination predominantly by means of converb clauses. These are headed by nonfinite verbs, i.e. converbs, which have a converb suffix attached to the stem. The different converbs express different aspectual relations between the subordinate and the superordinate clause, and they can be modifying or non-modifying. We analyse data from speakers of Turkish as a heritage language in Germany and the U.S. as well as monolingual speakers of Turkish in Turkey. The data come from two age groups: adults and adolescents. We show that unlike in canonical Turkish, converbs in heritage Turkish can be multifunctional, meaning that they can express both simultaneity and causality, for example. Furthermore, we show that converbs in heritage Turkish can be both modifying and non-modifying. As possible factors which might be responsible for such variation, we discuss language contact, sociolinguistic differences between the speaker communities (Germany vs. the U.S.) and age of the speakers.

The Paper contains a report on the theory and methodology used in a project on finnish syntax as investigated in (some genres of written) text. 123 texts containing 10,149 clauses (5016 graphical sentences) were analyzed according to a syntactic coding frame containing 63 variables. The variables include sentences structure, clause structure, clause type, clause function, clause length, surface word order, constituent structure, the text semantic and referential properties of nominal constituents, and some movement and deletion transformations. The theoretical considerations behind the selection of the variables are discussed in detail, as are the principles for syntactic sampling. The usefulness of the computer for certain low-level tasks is demonstrated, such as finding correlations between variables. The relevance of quantitative data to ‘qualitative’ syntactic description is stressed.

The development of grammatical markers has been described from several theoretical perspectives over the last decade: Grammaticalization Theory (Hopper & Traugott 2003, Heine, Claudi & Hünnemeyer (1991), the Minimalist Program (Roberts & Roussou 2003, van Gelderen 2004), and Lexical-Functional Grammar (Vincent 2001), see also the overview in (Börjars & Vincent 2010). It has recently been addressed in Construction Grammar, where it is argued that a shift towards a constructional perspective on change may yield new insights into the workings of grammaticalization (Bergs & Diewald 2008, Hoffmann & Trousdale 2013, Traugott & Trousdale 2013). This paper should be taken as a contribution to a constructional view on grammaticalization. It is about the rise of the concessive subordinator fast(än) in the history of Swedish occurring in a construction or clause type called universal concessive conditional (Haspelmath & Köning 1998), in Swedish generaliserande bisats (SAG 1999). The Swedish fast, etymologically (and still productively) as an adjective in the meaning ‘steady’, ‘robust’ is used as an intensifier, ‘very’, ‘much’, in early Modern Swedish, eventually established as a concessive marker ‘even if’, ‘although’ in the 18th century. The conventionalization of a concessive inference is highly interesting and may be traced back to specific constructions in the 16th and 17th centuries. On the basis of an extensive corpus study, I analyze the critical contexts and discuss the development as constructional change rather than lexical change, arguing that a remapping between form and function takes place in concessive conditional constructions due to processes of inferencing and mismatch.

Pseudocoordination with posture verbs in Mainland Scandinavian (e.g. the Norwegian Han sitter og arbeider ‘he sits and works’) is traditionally considered a grammaticalized progressive construction. The posture verb is said to have a bleached meaning, and to have the grammatical status of an auxiliary or a light verb. In recent years, some researchers have expressed doubt about this view. In this article, I argue that the traditional arguments for grammaticalization do not hold. However, I also give new evidence for early grammaticalization. Posture verbs can to some extent be used as light verbs in sentences such as Kebab må sittes og nytes ‘kebab must sit.pass and enjoy.pass’, which have never been discussed in connection with grammaticalization. Finally, I argue that pseudocoordination with posture verbs should not be seen as progressive, but rather as a locational (or situative) construction.

The project Dialect Levelling in West Sweden focuses on the dialect situation in the first decade of the 21st century compared with the dialects spoken in the same region in the 1940s–1960s. Seventy teenagers participating in group interviews have been recorded and their use of phonological and morphological variables has been analysed. Comparisons with data recorded in the same region by The Institute of Language and Folklore in 1940–1960 show that dialect levelling is under way. It seems that the population of this area no longer speak a traditional dialect. An important issue, however, is how much the traditional dialects have actually changed, and to what extent the method for collecting data affects the answer. In the mid-20th century, the praxis within Swedish dialectology for selecting informants was to find as old and rural dialect speakers as possible to represent a specific region, and the purpose was that of documenting the dialect as a linguistic system. Today, however, many studies select informants based on speaker variables, because the aim is to document the dialect situation (i.e. who uses what linguistic variants when), rather than the traditional dialect as a linguistic system. Thus, there is a distinct difference between a linguistic interest and a sociolinguistic one. In this paper I suggest that it is critical when discussing dialect change to observe this very methodological change. In order to illustrate this, the use of dialect variants by two informants recorded in 1948 is compared with the use of dialect variants by three informants recorded in 2007 and 2008. The informants are all from around a small rural village located approximately 70 km from Gothenburg in West Sweden. This is an area where a specific variety of West Swedish has been spoken. By comparing these individuals, the concept of dialect change is problematized.

SWETWOL is implemented in the framework of Koskenniemi's (1983) two-level model. It contains a 48,000 item lexicon and a full inflectional description. Special attention was paid to the design of a computational analysis of productive Swedish compounds. Recall (coverage) and precision of SWETWOL meet high standards. SWETWOL has been extensively tested on various types of texts.

The phonological Highs and Lows of prosodic feet in East Norwegian utterances do not always coincide temporally with the phonetic Highs and Lows associated with the pitch contours characteristic of Accent 1 and Accent 2. This paper accounts for two distinct types of discrepancy between actual pitch level and perceived pitch level, i.e. phonological pitch level, in certain prosodically well-defined cases where pitch peaks appear to occur “too late”. In order to determine what is phonologically High or Low in a given prosodic foot, you often have to consider phonetic aspects of the pitch contours of the immediately preceding or the immediately following foot.

This paper investigates the variation in and development of a set of morphological variables in a register known to be used by Norwegian children when engaging in role play. In this register they code-switch to something resembling the standard or Oslo variety for their in-character role utterances. The variation across variables, subjects, and age is demonstrated and discussed, and although most variables are used in the standard variants, their rates vary. A fitted binomial generalised mixed effect analysis on the most frequent variables shows that the rate of standard variants increases significantly as an effect of age.

It is widely believed that copulas perform a mere grammatical function, as carriers of grammatical categories such as Tense, Mood and Aspect in sentences with non-verbal predicates. Accordingly, zero copulas are predicted to occur only in contexts where these grammatical categories are unmarked. This article argues that this view of copulas, and especially of zero copula encoding, is untenable as a principle of Universal Grammar. More generally, the article demonstrates how typological generalizations can be used as an evaluation measure for putative abstract principles of linguistic theory.

In many languages the syllabification of intervocalic consonants has been shown to be influenced by the principle of onset maximization, whereby as many segments are assigned to the subsequent syllable as are phonotactically legal. Icelandic, however, has been repeatedly argued to follow a coda maximization strategy even though opinion has remained divided on this. This paper is an attempt to address this issue from the psycholinguistic perspective. The results of two experiments leave little doubt that the proper syllabification in Icelandic is onset maximization rather than coda maximization, thereby aligning Icelandic with many other languages and providing further support for the onset maximization principle. A number of other aspects were investigated, including the special status of certain two-consonant clusters, preaspiration and gemination. Clusters with a maximum sonority difference between their constituents were found to tend towards tautosyllabicity, whereas those with a smaller sonority difference gravitate towards heterosyllabicity. Furthermore, there is at least some evidence for the claim that both preaspiration and gemination lend themselves to an analysis in terms of a sequence of two identical consonants at the underlying level.

Deverbal nouns are often referred to as hybrids, containing both verbal and nominal features. In many languages deverbal nouns tend to develop into what Vendler (1967) called perfect nouns. Various stages of this development in Norwegian are proposed, drawing on Grammaticalization Theory and Lexicalization Theory. Frequency data are provided from a large newspaper corpus. The deverbal nouns are analyzed as going through a process of lexicalization where reduction in compositionality, reduced token frequency and increased idiosyncrasy are central elements. This process is triggered by relevance to the root, language use, isomorphism and the maximal difference principle. The article shows that Norwegian deverbal nouns are in a state of flux and that even different members of the same morphological type may behave quite differently syntactically and semantically.

Mainland Scandinavian displays a main clause phenomenon (MCP), where some embedded clauses allow the word order V(erb)–Neg(ation), in addition to the canonical Neg–V. Much has been written on the licensing conditions for embedded V–Neg, but formulating the exact conditions has proven difficult. This may be due to the fact that research has typically focussed on selected sets of clauses allowing this phenomenon and much of it has been based on the authors’ grammaticality judgements. Drawing conclusions about the licensing conditions for embedded V–Neg requires examining all types of environments that allow it in natural speech as well as the types of environments that disallow it. Therefore, the primary goal of this paper is to map out the full distribution of embedded V–Neg. This paper examines embedded V–Neg collected from five corpora of spontaneous Norwegian speech. The data provide information on the relative frequency of V–Neg in various constructions and identify hitherto unattested contexts for this word order. The paper shows that V–Neg is productive in adjunct clauses, a fact difficult to accommodate under accounts claiming it is licensed under selection of specific predicates. The data support a more discourse-oriented approach to embedded V–Neg.

This paper presents a unified account of the distribution of Danish der within the framework of Government and Binding, analyzing der as a subject filler. The existence of empty subjects in cases of extraction out of embedded questions is explained by assuming proper government by AGR, not due to verbal inflection as in pro-drop languages, but rather due to the absorption by AGR of the features of an empty co-superscripted postverbal position.

This paper concerns crosslinguistic differences in the acceptability of so-called relative clause extraction constructions, exemplified by the unacceptable English sentence *This boat I know the guy that owns (associated with the acceptable canonical sentence I know the guy that owns this boat). It has sometimes been argued, since Ross (1967), that such extractions are universally blocked by a syntactic constraint. However, following observations of such structures in English and other languages, some linguists have argued that such sentences have varying degrees of acceptability and that the degree of acceptability depends on attention limits and pragmatic foregroundedness/backgroundedness. Another view which appears to have gained ground in recent years is one where the degree of acceptability is directly related to processing difficulty. The analysis presented in this paper is based on a comparison between English and Swedish, and includes authentic data, examples previously discussed in the literature, as well as acceptability-tested invented sentences. In the end it will be argued that, while the dominance- and processing-based proposals are on the right track, there is a more plausible and straightforward way of explaining the observed crosslinguistic variation using the theoretical framework of Construction Grammar. Thus, an alternative account will be presented drawing on general principles which are well established within cognitive- and construction-based theories.

This paper presents a syntactic account of the distribution of subject clitics in the Oslo dialect of Norwegian. In addition to providing a unified explanation for some seemingly unrelated facts about subject clitics, this account will be shown to have implications for the proper definition of the notions ‘variable’ and ‘anaphor’.

The paper proposes a refined analysis of the semantics and pragmatics of the Norwegian non-truth-conditional adverb jo ‘after all, of course’. According to the literature, jo indicates that the proposition is ‘given’ in some sense or other. Based on new empirical investigations, we argue that the Relevance-theoretic notion mutual manifestness (Sperber & Wilson 1986/1995, Blass 2000) accurately captures the givenness aspect of jo, and we demonstrate through authentic examples what it means for a proposition to be mutually manifest. In addition to mutual manifestness, jo signals that the proposition is a premise for deriving a conclusion. The conclusion often – but not always – opposes someone’s view. We argue that the frequent opposition interpretations are a consequence of the nature of the procedures encoded by jo. In addition to clarifying the semantic and pragmatic properties of jo, the paper sheds light on the Relevance-theoretic notion procedural semantics as well as illustrating its usefulness in the study of pragmatic particles.

During the last decade, generative linguists have tried various ways of building phonetic naturalness into the phonological evaluation measure. The phonological component being a mental reality, it is, however, not reasonable to give reference to physical phonetic properties such a prominent place. A return to more formal principles, such as the economy criterion originally suggested by Chomsky and Halle, might be better. Many morphophonemic alternations are not synchronically natural (in the phonetic sense) at all, but only seem so because they have preserved traits from their historically phonetic origin. This is demonstrated here for two seemingly natural rules in Faroese, Velar Softening and Hiatus Insertion. In all Faroese dialects, morphological simplification has burdened the rules with exceptions, but the rules have nowhere spread to new forms so as to become exceptionless again, as would be expected from a phonetically natural rule. In closing, the role of perceptional ease as a factor in language change is discussed.