This article investigates the use of non-referential subjects in contemporary Swedish. Given that Swedish has developed a strong subject requirement, expletive subjects are expected to be used in all clauses which lack a referential subject. In spoken Swedish, however, expletive and quasi-argument subjects are optional in utterances where there is an initial det ‘it’ which is linked to an empty position inside a finite or non-finite complement. The paper establishes that there are certain similarities between these examples and tough constructions but that the examples involving finite complements cannot be subsumed under a predication analysis which seems appropriate for the tough cases. Based on a number of authentic recorded examples, I discuss the processing of utterances with fronted anaphoric pronouns and point to certain similarities with parasitic gaps. The paper closes with a comparison with other Germanic languages.

The topic of this paper is markedness theory as initially developed in early works by Jakobson and Hjelmslev. The aim is to show how this early theory is (still) useful in the analysis of language-particular grammatical paradigms, and, further, to investigate which aspects of this early theory of markedness might still benefit from further refinements. One major point of this paper is to reinforce the notion of participation (a term originally suggested by Hjelmslev) as crucial in the understanding of markedness theory. Another major point is to show how the markedness relations of a paradigm depend not only on the members of the paradigm in question but also on the contexts in which the members of the paradigm are being used. Examples from Modern Danish grammar are given as illustration. The approach is functional-structural in the sense of Engberg-Pedersen et al. (1996).

The article presents a real-time study of standardization and regionalization processes with respect to the use of past participles of strong verbs in the western part of Denmark. Analyses of a large corpus of recordings of informants from two localities show that the use of the dialectal en form of the past participle suffix has been in decline during the last 30 years. The en forms are replaced by three other forms, one of which is (partly) dialectal, one regional and one standard Danish. The study indicates that a regionalization process has taken place prior to the time period studied, but that it has now been overtaken by a Copenhagen-based standardization process. The study also shows interesting differences between the two localities, arguably due to the geographical location and size, and to the status of the different participle forms in the traditional local dialects.

A phonological process in Norwegian takes morpheme-initial alveolar /t d n s/ to retroflex [ʈ ɖ ɳ ʂ] after a morpheme ending in the tap /ɾ/, a process which earlier descriptions in the literature have classified as obligatory. This paper reports on production experiments with both existing and novel words, which show that Norwegian speakers treat retroflexion of morpheme-initial /s/ as optional, and that they are more likely to apply retroflexion to a morpheme in /s-/ when the /s/ is followed by a consonant (/sC-/) than when the /s/ is followed by a vowel (/sV-/).