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.

This study is based interaction in institutional settings (job interviews, post-trial interviews with defendants, negotiations between high-school students, telephone conversations between social-walfare officers and parents) and examines the social significance of laughter in dialogue. As an example, two assumptions put forward by Jefferson (1979, 1984) are questioned—namely, that laughter is regularly triggered by something funny and that laughter always has a strong inviting character. The analyses show that, in dialogue, we often laugh alone and not always at things considered particularly funny. Mutual laughter is a sign of rapport and consensus. This is exemplified by the fact that in the job interviews resulting in a job offer there was more mutual laughter than in those involving applicants who were unsuccessful. Unilateral laughter is used to modify verbal expressions or attitudes and can help us in handling ambiguities and tension.

As is well known, vowel length in Modern Icelandic is in general predictable on the basis of syllable structure such that, in polysyllabic words, stressed vowels in open syllables are long, other vowels are short; in stressed monosyllables, however, vowels are long whether the syllable is open or closed by a single consonant, and short only when the syllable is closed by a consonant cluster. In contrast to the ‘final maximalistic’ strategy of Árnason (1980) and other unlikely syllabification schemes designed to unify these two patterns, we invoke Giegerich's (1985) characterization of foot structure as applied to German and English, according to which stressed monosyllables categorize metrically as disyllabic feet whose rightmost member is null. Thus, CVC structures are metrically /CV.CØ/, with the result that the generalization regarding vowel length in words of all types is simply that stressed vowels in open syllables are long, others short.

The article deals with Themes (the function associated with left-dislocated structures) and Tails (the function associated with right-dislocated structures) in English conversation. The noun phrase is placed as Theme in “our maths chap he is an Indian” and as Tail in “they very often are these Eastern Europeans”. It is shown that Themes and Tails are functionally different phenomena. Themes are explained interactionally in terms of the negotiation of information which takes place between speaker and hearer, while Tails are associated with the interpersonal or polite function of speech.

In this paper, we consider Swedish Finite VP-Topicalization and Yiddish Finite-Verb Topicalization, which share certain interesting features that have implications for Germanic syntax and for syntactic theory in general. Although neither construction contains a gap, we argue that both are products of Movement, but with a lexically realized trace, and that this phenomenon is crucially related to Movement of finite verbs. The arguments are based on the distribution of aspectual types, lexical and phonological phenomena, the V/2 Constraint, Subjacency, and discourse phenomena.

This paper argues that there is a phonological opposition between falling and non-falling utterance-terminal tunes in East Norwegian intonation. East Norwegian intonational foci are characterized by a rising pitch movement and there is no way that you can raise the pitch even further to express “rising intonation”. What you obtain instead is a distinction between a focal rise followed by a terminal fall in pitch and a focal rise without a subsequent falling terminal. The falling vs. non-falling terminal contrast is utilized differently in Intonation Units (IUs) with just one Intonational Phrase (IP) than in IUs with more than one Intonational Phrase. In the former type of IU structure a falling terminal constrains the illocutionary potential of the communicative act; in the latter type the falling terminal adds an attitudinal bias, without constraining the illocutionary potential. While most non-falling and falling terminals in connected discourse can ultimately be related to the difference between “openness” and “finality”, respectively, this intonational contrast is shown to have a seemingly quite different function in imperatives.

The present paper deals with the study of repair patterns. Repair, seen as some type of intrinsic trouble manifested by some party during interaction, has here been studied in an institutional setting, the second-language class-room. The repair sequences have been studied relative to the activity type in which the participants are involved. The results show the following: first, that the activity type has an impact on the repair pattern; and secondly, both quantitative and qualitative differences in repair patterns are found when compared with non-educational and foreign-language-teaching settings.