This article explores the language of social media by analyzing a selection of linguistic features in four corpora of Swedish social media available at Språkbanken Text: Blog mix, Familjeliv, Flashback, and Twitter. Previous research describes the language of these corpora as informal, spoken-like, unedited, non-standard, and innovative. Our corpus analysis confirms the informal and spoken-like nature of social media, while also showing that these traits are unevenly distributed across the various social media corpora and that they are also present in other traditional written corpora, such as novels. Our findings also reveal that the social media corpora show traits of involved and interactional language.

This study investigates the referential forms children use to introduce characters in Swedish, in a cross-sectional sample of oral narratives by 100 Turkish/Swedish bilinguals aged 4 to 7 and in a longitudinal sample from age 4 to 6 (N = 10). We analysed development with age and how language proficiency (expressive vocabulary) and exposure affect children’s use of referring expressions, with a focus on referential appropriateness. In addition, a qualitative analysis of the characteristics of high- and low-performing children was carried out. The results show significant effects of age and language proficiency, but not of language exposure on appropriate use of referring expressions. At age 7, 69% of the characters were introduced with an indefinite NP. The Turkish/Swedish bilinguals were found to lag behind in their use of indefinite NPs in comparison to Swedish-speaking children investigated in previous studies, with little crosslinguistic influence from L1 Turkish.

The Gutnish-specific si-passive combines be or become with a participle, directly followed by the element si. Unlike regular periphrastic passives, si-passives focus on the process rather than the result, opening up the construction for unergatives, which are unattested in the regular type. However, si-passives are quite limited when it comes to the subject. Internal arguments can only become subjects if they strand a preposition or a particle. Otherwise, the subject is expletive. I argue that si is part of the participle ending in Aspo, where its phi-features block agreement with the internal argument, trapping it in situ and depriving Aspo of a link to the result of the event. Originally a reflexive, si was reanalysed as a marker of the participle rather than the infinitive in contexts where conjugational changes had made them ambiguous. These changes never affected Fårö, where the si-passive is thus correctly predicted to be absent.

Most modern studies of Swedish phonology take the view that the underlying vowel inventory of Central Standard Swedish comprises nine, rather than seventeen or eighteen, mutually contrasting vowel phonemes. A residual problem of a classic phonological type concerns the borrowed entities, rendered in traditional Swedish orthography as au and eu, whose ‘status in the vowel system is unclear’ (Riad 2014:42). The present paper scrutinizes earlier and current phonological interpretations of these entities, adduces evidence for and against each proposal, and concludes that the case for treating them as phonemic diphthongs /V͡V/, as /VC/-sequences, or as monosyllabic /VV̯/-sequences is weak and that they should in the first place be viewed as underlying heterosyllabic vowel sequences /VV/, subject to a special phonological stipulation valid for a borrowed sub-domain of the lexicon. Typologically, Central Standard Swedish should continue to be subsumed under the category of languages that lack phonological diphthongs.

This article gives an overview of the use of non-local passives in mainland Scandinavian, i.e. passives where the subject of the first verb is a thematic argument of a second verb. Three factors are important: whether V1 is a control verb or a raising passive, whether V2 is a passive participle or an infinitive and whether the passive is morphological or periphrastic. Danish and Norwegian allow passive control verbs such as forsøge ‘try’ with passive participles whereas this pattern is only found with semi-control verbs like begära ‘request’ in Swedish. In Swedish there is an alternative strategy for strict control verbs, viz. active control verb plus passive infinitive. All three languages allow both passive infinitival complements and passive participles with raising passives such as påstås ‘is claimed’. These passive constructions need to be distinguished from so called long passives and double passives where a passive feature on either V1 or V2 can spread to the adjacent verb.

This paper discusses pronominal demonstratives (PDs) in homeland and heritage (American) Norwegian and Swedish. We establish a baseline approximating the language of the early emigrants, based on 19th/20th century Norwegian dialect recordings and Swedish texts. Baseline Norwegian had a fully established PD expressing psychological distance (see Johannessen 2008a). In Swedish, however, PDs do not quite behave like (distal) demonstratives: they can combine with a definite determiner or a regular demonstrative, and they do not fully have the pragmatic functions that demonstratives have. We propose that the Swedish PD is a pronoun rather than a demonstrative, without the full set of regular pronominal features, but with logophoric features that activate knowledge shared between the speaker and addressee. Data from AmNo show that PDs are preserved in this heritage language, across several generations. On the assumption that PDs are indexical and that speech act participants are represented in narrow syntax, it comes as no surprise that they are retained (Polinsky 2018:63–65), although this may, on the face of it, appear to be at odds with the Interface Hypothesis (e.g. Sorace & Filiaci 2006, Sorace 2011).

The speech perception ability of people with hearing loss can be efficiently measured using phonemic-level scoring. We aimed to develop linguistic stimuli suitable for a closed-set phonemic discrimination test in the Swedish language called the Situated Phoneme (SiP) test. The SiP test stimuli that we developed consisted of real monosyllabic words with minimal phonemic contrast, realised by phonetically similar phones. The lexical and sublexical factors of word frequency, phonological neighbourhood density, phonotactic probability, and orthographic transparency were similar between all contrasting words. Each test word was recorded five times by two different speakers, including one male and one female. The accuracy of the test-word recordings was evaluated by 28 normal-hearing subjects in a listening experiment with a silent background using a closed-set design. With a few exceptions, all test words could be correctly discriminated. We discuss the results in terms of content- and construct-validity implications for the Swedish SiP test.

Normative ratings are a means to control for the effects of confounding variables in psycholinguistic experiments. This paper introduces a new dataset of normative ratings for Swedish encompassing 111 concrete nouns and the corresponding picture stimuli in the MultiPic database (Duñabeitia et al. 2017). The norms for name agreement, category typicality, age of acquisition and subjective frequency were collected using online surveys among native speakers of the Finland-Swedish variety of Swedish. The paper discusses the inter-correlations between these variables and compares them against available ratings for other languages. In doing so, the paper argues that ratings for age of acquisition and subjective frequency collected for other languages may be applied to psycholinguistic studies on Finland-Swedish, at least with respect to concrete and highly imageable nouns. In contrast, norms for name agreement should be collected from speakers of the same language variety as represented by the subjects in the actual experiments.

This longitudinal study investigated the development of oral narrative skills in monolingual Swedish-speaking children (N = 17). The MAIN Cat/Dog stories were administered at four timepoints between age 4 and 9. Different narrative aspects were found to develop differently. In story comprehension, the children performed high already at T1 (4;4) and were at ceiling at T2 (5;10), whereas story structure developed significantly until T4 (9;4). Narrative length and syntactic complexity reached a plateau at T3 (7;4). Referent introduction was not mastered until T4. The results suggest that general conclusions regarding the development of narrative skills depend on the specific aspects studied.

It has been reported that speakers of Danish understand more Swedish than vice versa. One reason for this asymmetry might be that spoken Swedish is closer to written Danish than vice versa. We hypothesise that literate speakers of Danish use their orthographic knowledge of Danish to decode spoken Swedish. To test this hypothesis, first-language (L1) Danish speakers were confronted with spoken Swedish in a translation task. Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were elicited to study the online brain responses during decoding operations. Results showed that ERPs to words whose Swedish pronunciation was inconsistent with the Danish spelling were significantly more negative-going than ERPs to words whose Swedish pronunciation was consistent with the Danish spelling between 750 ms and 900 ms after stimulus onset. Together with higher word-recognition scores for consistent items, our data provide strong evidence that online activation of L1 orthography enhances word recognition of spoken Swedish in literate speakers of Danish.

Are some languages universally seen as beautiful? And if so, what are the linguistic traits that make some languages sound more pleasing than others? This paper addresses these two questions. We do so with results from two listener experiments that use speech samples from a bilingual Danish–Swedish speaker in a matched guise test, where the listeners are ‘previously unexposed’ students from central China. Our results indicate that listeners from Central China with no previous exposure find Swedish more pleasing sounding than Danish. This finding provides evidence that there could be features of language that sound more beautiful to listeners cross-culturally. In a follow-up experiment we remove the intonation contours of the speech to see whether this prosodic trait plays a role for evaluations. The results show that the difference in evaluations between Swedish and Danish disappears when both speech samples are monotonised. We discuss the importance of our findings for language attitudes research.

This article questions the prevalent account of North Germanic tonogenesis, which proposes that at the outset, Accent 2 was characterized by a double-peaked melody close to the one found in central Swedish today (Riad 1998, Kingston 2011). The spreading patterns observed in the data analyzed here are difficult to reconcile with this hypothesis. My analysis instead offers support in favor of the alternative hypothesis that the phonetic roots of the accentual contrast are to be found in a difference in timing between single peaks, specifically, peak delay in plurisyllabic domains, but not in mono-syllables due to lack of space. The variation observed in the single peak Dalarna varieties today, from robust timing differences in the south to absence or only partial implementation of the tonal contrast in the north, strongly suggests that the accentual contrast has been spreading northwards through incremental peak delay in Accent 2 words. I argue that this situation mirrors the initial stages in the development that, through additional peak delay, eventually resulted in a double-peaked Accent 2 melody in central Scandinavia. At the same time, the older single peak patterns are still retained in Dalarna and scattered around the geographical margins of Norway and Sweden.*

Previous studies have investigated the cognitive processes of simultaneous interpreting and translation using eye-tracking. No study has yet utilized eye-tracking to investigate cognitive load and cognitive effort in dialogue interpreting. An eye-tracking study was conducted on two groups of interpreters (experienced and inexperienced) with varying language backgrounds during a staged dialogue interpreting session. The aim of the study was to explore gaze patterns in dialogue interpreting in relation to the interpreters’ action and translation direction. The results indicated there were differences in gaze patterns depending on the action and the language used. Participants averted gaze more when interpreting into the allophone language (the L2 for a majority of the participants in this study). This may indicate that interpreting into L2 in a dialogue may involve more cognitive effort than interpreting into L1. Finally, gaze patterns did not differ significantly between inexperienced and experienced dialogue interpreters.

The new forms of written online communication offer a great resource for researchers interested in language variation and use, but more large-scale systematic research into the nature of the data is needed. For instance, Swedish blog data is often described as more informal and spoken in nature than traditional edited written material but overall systematic comparisons are lacking. This short communication contributes systematic comparisons between blog data and spoken and written registers by comparing measures such as type/token ratios and word frequencies. Type/token ratios of blog texts are found to lie between those for interactive speech and formal edited writing, whereas the distribution of words from different frequency bands is closer to the written material. Comparison of the ten most frequent word forms indicates that blog data resembles formal edited writing from a structural perspective, but also suggests that further studies into features of personal involvement may provide additional insights.

This paper critically examines the exclusive use of the relative frequency of subordinate clauses as a measure of syntactic complexity in Second Language Acquisition (SLA) L2 acquisition and as an indicator of Second Language (L2) development. Following Lambert & Kormos (2014), it is argued that it is important to also take into account: (i) different subordinate clause types, (ii) item-based frequencies, and (iii) text genre. Longitudinal written data was collected among 21 Dutch-speaking foreign language learners of Swedish. Based on these data, the study shows that the subordination ratio (a common measure for syntactic complexity) alone was found to be insufficient as an indicator of syntactic complexity and L2 development, as hardly any significant differences were observed in the subordination ratios of the learners and native speakers. The study shows that other aspects are also relevant in determining the learners’ level of syntactic complexity as well as their L2 development, such as the internal structure and context of subordinate clauses, subordinate clause types, and especially the type-token ratio of subordinators used. The results showed a significant negative correlation between the subordination ratio of texts and the type-token ratio of subordinators. The aim of the study is to acknowledge the variation in the learners’ use of subordinate clause, in addition to the general subordination ratio, in order to arrive at a more nuanced view of syntactic complexity in second language acquisition.

This article discusses the existence of transitive expletive constructions (TECs) in Swedish. It is often claimed that TECs are a distinctive feature of Insular Scandinavian, but do not exist in Mainland Scandinavian. In this article, however, it is shown that such constructions do occur throughout the history of Swedish and, to some extent, still occur in present-day Swedish, although nowadays the language has none of the features previously proposed as licensing TECs. It is also shown that Swedish has a broader repertoire of associate subjects in TECs than does Icelandic. Unlike in Icelandic, associate subjects can also be definite in Swedish. The presence of TECs in Swedish calls into question the previous analysis of the licensing of this construction, and in this article a new explanation for the phenomenon is proposed. It is claimed that TECs are possible if the expletive can merge in a position structurally higher than the canonical subject position. In the case of V2 languages, this implies that expletives must be able to merge in Spec,CP, and it is shown that in Swedish they are able to merge in this position.