There are basically three ways in which the reference of a token of the English proximal spatial indexical here and corresponding terms in other languages can be resolved in the context-dependent, pragmatic phase of the addressee's determination of the propositional content of an utterance that contains this adverbial adjunct. ‘Here’ may refer reflexively to the place of utterance, including minimally the spot occupied by the speaker (token-reflexive reference), it may be anaphoric upon a discourse antecedent that provides information necessary for identification of the referent (anaphoric reference), or resolution of the reference depends on information derived from processing of a perceptual stimulus (deictic reference). These three pragmatic paths to resolution of the reference of proximal spatial indexicals are not mutually exclusive, so they do not warrant postulation of lexical ambiguity, at least not the traditional kind of ambiguity based on differences in conceptual meaning.

This is the first issue of volume 34 of the Nordic Journal of Linguistics. The NJL is the journal of the Nordic Association of Linguists. Individuals may subscribe to the Journal by joining the Nordic Association of Linguists. The NAL membership form can be found on the Cambridge University Press web site of the NJL, http://journals.cambridge.org/NJL, as well as on the NAL web site, http://www.uef.fi/nal.

The theme of this special issue is the languages of the Nordic countries and linguistic typology. By ‘the Nordic countries’ we refer to the five countries of Finland, Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Iceland. Genetically, the Nordic languages are divided between the Uralic and the Indo-European language families. The Indo-European languages are represented through the North Germanic branch, and conversely the ‘homeland’ of the North Germanic branch is more or less exclusively located within the borders of the Nordic countries. The Uralic languages are represented through most of the languages of the Sami branch (from Southwest to Northeast: South Sami, Ume Sami, Pite Sami, Lule Sami, North Sami, Inari Sami and Skolt Sami; the remaining two Sami languages, Kildin and Ter Sami, are both spoken on the Kola peninsula in Russia), and the Finnic branch, with the four closely related varieties Finnish, Karelian (Eastern Finland), Kven (Northern Norway) and Meänkieli (Northern Sweden).

This paper looks at negation in Finnish dialects from a typological perspective. The focus is on standard negation, i.e. the negation of declarative verbal main clauses. The dialectal variation that Finnish shows in its negative construction is examined in the light of current typological knowledge of the expression of negation. Developmental trends connected to the micro-typological variation are also discussed, Finnish dialects are compared with related and neighbouring languages, and relevant theoretical and methodological issues relating to the meeting point of typology and dialectology are addressed.

The second issue of volume 35 (2012) of the Nordic Journal of Linguistics will be a special issue devoted to Case Variation and Change in the Nordic Languages, edited by Jeffrey K. Parrott.

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.

The topic of this paper is convergence in an asymmetrical bilingual setting, and it will be shown that the outcome of the convergence process is different in the dominant language (L1) from what it is in the receiving language (L2). In L1, there is complication of the receiving language, while there is reduction in the syntax of the L2.

This paper examines rule-based learning and item-based learning in relation to a Swedish child's acquisition of verb second in main clauses. While rule-based accounts assert that young children have access to syntactic structure and acquire a rule of generalized verb second, item-based accounts claim that young children are reproducing frequent word combinations in the input. The paper provides new and important data from one Swedish child, concluding that the acquisition of verb second is the result of rule-based learning.

This paper presents a comparative synchronic corpus investigation of Mainland Scandinavian må, måtte and måste ‘must, may’. These modals developed a wide range of different meanings and uses within the realm of necessity, possibility and beyond, i.e., ability, capacity, need, desirability, permission, wish, obligation, uncertainty, probability and concession. The rise of modal and postmodal meanings is a well-known instance of semantic change that follows predictable grammaticalization paths. Furthermore, the development of modals is a prototypical instance of grammaticalization as they are forms on their way from lexical to grammatical status. Because of this, modals have properties of both main verbs and auxiliaries to various extents. This paper will outline the etymology, grammaticalization paths, semantic distributions and formal properties of må, måtte and måste and show that these modals represent different stages of grammaticalization in the Mainland Scandinavian languages.

Since Maling's (1980) study of embedded verb-second, Icelandic Stylistic Fronting has been an extensively studied aspect of Icelandic syntax. It is widely regarded as an optional fronting operation which moves an ordinarily post-verbal constituent to the pre-verbal domain just in case there is a subject gap. In this study, variationist methodology is employed to study quantitatively the conditioning effects of several syntactic and prosodic factors on Stylistic Fronting in two transcribed corpora of spoken Icelandic. The results show that some grammatical categories favor fronting more than others, and that fronting is affected by the number of syllables in the frontable constituent and the material surrounding the landing site. This lends support to the long-standing intuition that prosodic factors influence the choice to use Stylistic Fronting (which is syntactically optional), while at the same time suggests avenues for further research in addressing certain issues in the syntax of Stylistic Fronting, such as the ‘accessibility hierarchy’.

In the Scandinavian languages, sentential negation must be licensed in Spec–head relation in the IP-domain, necessitating leftward movement of negative objects, Negative Shift (NegS). While string-vacuous NegS is possible in all Scandinavian varieties, there is a fair amount of cross-linguistic variation in non-string-vacuous NegS. In particular, the varieties contrast in which constituents can be crossed by NegS and whether or not crossing of a certain constituent requires the presence of an intervening verb. The paper presents the complex variation as to the distribution of negative objects in Scandinavian, using data from different sources, and outlines an analysis within Fox & Pesetsky's (2003, 2005a, b) cyclic linearization model, which accounts for this variation by differences in the availability of the intermediate positions non-string-vacuous movement is forced to proceed through.

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.

Most Norwegian declaratives are subject-initial verb second (V2) clauses. This paper discusses declaratives that can be construed as non-V2, two constructions that have traditionally been analyzed as left dislocation phenomena: the (adjunctive) så-construction and the Copy Left Dislocation (CLD) construction, where the ‘copy’ is a weak pronoun. Both constructions share an affinity to root clauses, have particular scope effects, and employ a prosodically light particle between the topicalized phrase and the finite verb in V2 (så and a weak pronoun, respectively). The paper attributes these properties to the fact that the relevant particles are topic markers of a particular kind; they mark A-topics. A-Topics signal a topic-shift in the conversation and are confined to clauses with illocutionary force (Bianchi & Frascarelli 2010). The aforementioned particles are much more frequent in spoken contexts than in written prose, and I propose that this is because they depend on prosody. They are obligatorily light, and they occur in the part of the clause that has traditionally been described as ‘the Wackernagel position’. Wackernagel (1892) proposed that certain prosodically light elements (clitics in particular) tend to occur in the second position in Indo-European languages. Although the resumptive elements of the så-construction and especially of CLDs may not be fully-fledged clitics, like clitics, they appear in the second position of declaratives.

This investigation compares articulation rates of phonological and phonetic syllables in Norwegian, Swedish and Danish to investigate differences in degrees of syllable deletion (reduction) among these three languages. For the investigation two sets of data are used: one consisting of recorded speech from radio news and another consisting of sentences read aloud. The results of the comparative investigation show that in both data sets Danish exhibits a much larger degree of syllable reduction in speech than Norwegian and Swedish. The finding that certain syllable deletion processes take place in Danish but not in Norwegian and Swedish is viewed as typological. The results indicate that Danish words are shorter than their Norwegian and Swedish counterparts. This could be a contributing factor to problems that arise in inter-Scandinavian communication.