This special issue on Language Change of the Nordic Journal of Linguistics contains five articles relating to the topic in different ways, clustering around three main themes: (de)grammaticalization, word order and stress systems.

It has been argued that the development of the Swedish possessive -s constitutes an example of degrammaticalisation because it has changed from being an affix to being a clitic (Norde 1997; 2001a, b). I argue that a simple distinction between affix and clitic cannot capture the development of this element, instead a distinction in two dimensions need to be made; PLACEMENT needs to be distinguished from DEGREE OF ATTACHMENT. Furthermore, I claim that the distinction between agreement and once only marking represents yet another dimension. With respect to the Swedish possessive, as Norde (1997) shows, there has been a clear change from agreement to once only marking; however, I argue that this change does not tell us anything about the element's morphological status. With respect to placement, -s is still subject to competing constraints and with respect to attachment, there is some evidence of morphological interaction between the -s and the word to which it attaches. It is then inappropriate to call the Swedish possessive -s a clitic and to refer to the change which it has undergone as degrammaticalisation.

The present paper deals with the construction ta og/och V ‘take and V’ in the Nordic languages. After a brief overview of pseudocoordinations of the type ‘V1 and V2’, the use and meaning of the ta-construction is discussed, with special emphasis on Modern Norwegian. It is argued that the subject of the activity expressed by V2 must normally have an agentive role, and that the construction has an intentional and initiating meaning. After having established the meaning of the modern construction, the historical development of the construction is discussed. On the basis of Old Norse examples, it is argued that the ta-construction has developed out of paratactically combined sentences where ta has been desemanticized, and has come to function as a kind of auxiliary. However, this development must, at least partly, have taken place at a very early stage. A hypothesis that the ta-construction has been borrowed from Greek is rejected.

Parts of a new model of phonology-morphology-lexicon interplay is presented to account for the complex distribution of the Modern Danish stød (a syllabic prosody). Stød, which is sometimes productive for speakers, is analysed as a signal of the second mora of bimoraic syllables not subject to the Non-Stød Principle (NSP). The author's cross-language model for Systematically Graded Productivity of Endings (section 3) is shown to account for the application of NSP (section 4), and a detailed typology of lexemes with respect to stød-alternations, derived from the model, is presented in section 5. In section 6, a simple case of stød-alternations in inflection, viz. regular plurals of nouns, is given, and section 7 exemplifies stød and non-stød as a key to morphology for the addressee.

This paper focuses on the origin of the V2 property in the history of Germanic. Considering data from Gothic and Old English (OE), it is suggested that the historical core of the V2 phenomenon reduces to V-to-C movement that is triggered in operator contexts. Therefore, the historical system shares basic properties with limited V2 in Modern English. It is shown that apparent deviations from this pattern that can be observed in Gothic can be attributed to the influence of Greek word order. Concerning the apparently more elaborate V2 properties of OE, it is claimed that a large part of them in fact do not involve a Spec-head relation, but rather result from linear adjacency between the clause-initial element and a finite verb located in T0. Special attention is paid to the placement of pronominal subjects in OE, which are claimed to occupy SpecTP. This contrasts with a lower position of full subjects due to the absence of an EPP in OE. Finally, the loss of superficial V2 orders in the Middle English period is attributed to the development of an EPP feature in T.

In Icelandic, and in most dialects of Faroese, the fundamental laryngeal stop contrast is one of aspiration. This contrast is neutralized in certain positions, following patterns which appear problematic for perceptually-based theories (licensing by cue). In postvocalic onset position, a cue-rich environment, the contrast is absent in Icelandic. Most dialects neutralize to unaspirated [p, t, k], whereas others have postaspirated [ph, th, kh] instead. In the latter case, the appearance of loanwords with intervocalic [p, t, k] is now creating an incipient aspiration contrast, undoing the previous neutralization pattern. The implications of these facts for Optimality Theory (Richness of the Base) are discussed. In certain dialects of Faroese, such postvocalic singleton onsets are realized as PREaspirated [hp, ht, hk]. Curiously, this preaspiration is suppressed in precisely the contexts where it ought to be most salient. An OT analysis is developed to account for this distribution.

This article attempts to shed light on the issue of a possible link between the loss of ‘rich’ subject-verb agreement and the loss of verb raising in embedded clauses in earlier stages of the Mainland Scandinavian languages. Different versions of this so-called ‘Rich Agreement Hypothesis’ are compared in light of new diachronic data from the history of Danish. Examples of word order variation with and without verb raising over sentential adverbials were collected from a corpus of twelve sets of texts written in the Early Modern Danish period (ca. 1500–1700). Empirical results indicate that distinctions in person agreement in the verbal inflectional paradigm disappeared nearly 250 years before a significant decline in the frequency of verb raising. In order to explain a possible trigger for this change, the article closely examines the impact of structurally ambiguous word order and syntactic – not morphological – clues during acquisition.

While standard Norwegian is a V2 language, some Norwegian dialects exhibit V3 in certain types of wh-questions. In some previous work on the Tromsø dialect, V3 has been considered the ‘true’ dialect and speakers' acceptance of V2 simply a result of the influence from the standard language. Based on child and adult data from a study of the acquisition of word order in the Tromsø dialect, I will argue that both V2 and V3 orders are part of the dialect – used by adult speakers and acquired (more or less) simultaneously by children. It will further be argued that the choice between the two depends on the information structure of the sentence, more specifically, on the interpretation of the subject as given or new information.

A shift from left to right word-edge main stress can be observed in a large number of languages. Three cases, Icelandic/Faroese, Polish and Latin are studied in this paper. In doing so, two descriptive rule-based models are compared in order to evaluate their descriptive and explicative adequacy. The causes that have been proposed for the observed changes are critically discussed. Finally, an OT-description of the case studies is provided.