Through a critical exposition of the essential literature on the concept of “subject” in Danish it is demonstrated that the subject properties which are put forward there — and which are related to different levels of description: phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics — are mutually incongruous. We argue that it is only possible to define the subject as a collection of features drawn from several levels. On the basis of the feature collection which we postulate the problem “subject as sentence constituent” is incorporated into the valency model, and in this connection a distinction is made between the abstract valency-conditioned entity and its realization in given sentence patterns. Sentence constituents are entities which can be defined only for sentence patterns.

In the present article, it is claimed that German, being basically an SOV-language, has a clearly delimitable extrapositional field behind the final verb field of the sentence, whereas Norwegian, which belongs to a VO-type, is in this respect more indeterminate. Two general facts corroborate this assumption. First, extraposition is in German systematically correlated with certain other syntactic phenomena that are either non-existent or play a far more peripheral part in Norwegian. Second, certain constructions of German that are uniformly extrapositional have a number of different translational equivalents in Norwegian which are only in part extrapositional in character. It is also claimed that these Norwegian constructions are formally more diverse, insofar as rules with a different structural impact are required to account for their syntactic behaviour.

Swedish noun-phrases of the form (Det) (Adj)* N are examined in the light of recent work in generalized phrase-structure grammar. It is argued that simple generalizations about the phrase-structure of these NPs are lost by trying to account for the precise morphological possibilities by using phrase-structure rules mentioning categories marked with morphological features. What could be accounted for by two rules must be broken down into subcases which need seven rules, thereby obscuring the overall syntactic structure of the NPs. An alternative is suggested which maintains the simple syntax which generates morphologically ill-formed NPs but only allows morphologically well-formed ones to be interpreted. It is suggested that this system can be constrained so as to generate only context-free languages.

Recent research on vowel perception has seriously questioned the perceptual relevance of the formant concept and the conventional method of specifying vowel quality in terms of the lowest formants. The phonetic basis of the theory of palatal vowel harmony suggested by the author (Suomi 1983) was stated in this framework and, moreover, some of the central concepts were defined only qualitatively. The present paper is a restatement of the phonetic motivation of palatal vowel harmony against a body of perceptually more realistic and quantitative data on Finnish vowels.

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.

The article presents in English, and in a condensed form, the central ideas of Wurzel (1984), a monograph devoted to an explication of the concept of naturalness in a theory of inflexional morphology. A set of theoretical distinctions and a set of principles (considered as universal tendencies) are formulated, which capture the naturalness criteria of inflexional morphology. Evidence for these principles, which are ranked according to applicational strength, is primarily drawn from data pertaining to linguistic change.