Nordic Linguistics

This paper critically reviews SJ Keyser and Paul Kiparsky's "Syllable Structure in Finnish Phonology" (1984). We also treat Finnish morpho-phonemics using a CV-tier analysis, but account for forms that their method fails on. We posit six stem types in the verbal lexicon and ...

The semantics of the linguistic modals is argued to be determined mainly by the power structure of the participants in the interaction. In the deontic uses of the modals, another determining factor is the expectations of the participants' attitudes towards the relevant action. By viewing the evidence as a power in its own right, our analysis can be generalized to

... Hoekstra 1997), Yiddish (Prince 1998; Jacobs 2005), and ¨Ovdalian (Levander 1909; Rosenkvist 1994, 2006, 2009). ... system and a complex case system (Ringmar 2005), null referential subjects (Rosenkvist 2006), and negative concord and verb raising (Garbacz 2006, 2010 ...

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.

This special issue of Nordic Journal of Linguistics is dedicated to the emerging field of forensic linguistics. There are competing definitions and delimitations of this term but here we will use it to refer to the investigation and elucidation of language evidence in a legal context. This includes the scrutiny of language data from different stages of the legal process, ranging from emergency calls to police interviews and courtroom interaction, as well as expert assessment and witness testimony in cases where the meaning or authorship of texts or utterances are questioned. While the analysis of authentic case data is often preferred or even required, access to such highly sensitive data types is naturally restricted by legal and ethical boundaries. An increasing amount of studies therefore employ experimental designs to test hypotheses and improve methodologies.

Turkish expresses adverbial subordination predominantly by means of converb clauses. These are headed by nonfinite verbs, i.e. converbs, which have a converb suffix attached to the stem. The different converbs express different aspectual relations between the subordinate and the superordinate clause, and they can be modifying or non-modifying. We analyse data from speakers of Turkish as a heritage language in Germany and the U.S. as well as monolingual speakers of Turkish in Turkey. The data come from two age groups: adults and adolescents. We show that unlike in canonical Turkish, converbs in heritage Turkish can be multifunctional, meaning that they can express both simultaneity and causality, for example. Furthermore, we show that converbs in heritage Turkish can be both modifying and non-modifying. As possible factors which might be responsible for such variation, we discuss language contact, sociolinguistic differences between the speaker communities (Germany vs. the U.S.) and ...

ABSTRACTThe history and etymology of Old Scandinavian hinn is a disputed matter. One question concerns whether hinn as a contrastive demonstrative indicating ‘the other (one)/the former (one)’ and hinn as a pre-adjectival article, both of which to some extent are still found in present-day Icelandic, are related or not. Another issue concerns the fact that hinn has no immediate parallel in Germanic outside Scandinavia, which has led scholars to assume that it is a Proto-Scandinavian innovation. This paper argues that Old Scandinavian possessed two hinn words with separate backgrounds, one stemming directly from an anciently inherited distal demonstrative, and one from an innovated proximal demonstrative. However, the innovation was no more founded on common Germanic material than the former hinn was. Instead, it arose from the reinforcement of an ancient precursor. This precursor is traceable in early Icelandic enn, which was used as a pre-adjectival article and as a primitive post-...

This article reports on a comparison of lexical items in the vocabulary of Icelandic and Danish sign languages prompted by anecdotal reports of similarity and historical records detailing close contact between the two communities. Drawing on previous studies, including Bickford (2005), McKee and Kennedy (1998, 2000a, 2000b) and Parkhurst and Parkhurst (2001), the authors elicited signs via a word list

In this paper, we argue for a view of case marking that does not treat case as the passive realisation of other morpho-syntactic properties of a construction but as independently bringing information to a clause. This different view of case entails that precise functions of case-marked expressions may be determined by the interaction of the case marking, the meaning of the host noun, the semantics of any predicate of which it is an argument and other contextually given factors. With respect to Estonian, it is argued that there is only one ‘structural’ case, the genitive, and this case marks non-subject, or oblique, dependency on some head. The partitive case, we argue, is semantically partitive in all its uses, except that the partitive meaning can be obscured or even eliminated depending on contextual factors. The nominative is merely the absence of case, associated with no specific positions or semantic effects.

Shortly after arriving in Copenhagen five years ago, I realized what many linguists have long understood: the case situation in the Nordic languages is formidably complex. Of course, the broad outlines of inter-speaker (or, cross-linguistic) variation in Nordic nominal case inflection are well known. Within two major language families, (North) Germanic and Uralic, there are dozens of closely related language varieties. The Finnic and Sami languages of Uralic have adpositional case systems, while the North Germanic languages can be further subdivided into the Mainland and Insular groups, partially on the basis of their different case systems. The latter group, namely Icelandic, Faroese, and Älvdalian (which is spoken in a fairly isolated rural community in the interior of Sweden), has ‘rich’ inflectional case morphology on a range of elements comprising nominal phrases, including articles, determiners, demonstratives, nouns, pronouns, wh-words, and more. The former group, namely Dani...

The aim of this article is to examine how police investigators reproduce interviewees’ utterances in narratives, in direct and indirect reported speech, and by enclosing words in reports in quotation marks. Drawing on a larger study of professional writing, the pertinent research question for the current investigation is how writing techniques in police interview reports convey evidential value in the form of reported utterances. A corpus of police reports on domestic violence is explored from the theoretical perspectives of critical discourse analysis, polyvocality and reportative evidentiality. A new analytical framework for polyvocal texts is developed in terms of utterance, source and framer. The results show that it is difficult to determine whether or not words placed within quotation marks are meant to present verbatim quotes. Another finding is that police investigators are not consistent in documenting utterances from different sources, or in showing whether utterances are ...

Turkish expresses adverbial subordination predominantly by means of converb clauses. These are headed by nonfinite verbs, i.e. converbs, which have a converb suffix attached to the stem. The different converbs express different aspectual relations between the subordinate and the superordinate clause, and they can be modifying or non-modifying. We analyse data from speakers of Turkish as a heritage language in Germany and the U.S. as well as monolingual speakers of Turkish in Turkey. The data come from two age groups: adults and adolescents. We show that unlike in canonical Turkish, converbs in heritage Turkish can be multifunctional, meaning that they can express both simultaneity and causality, for example. Furthermore, we show that converbs in heritage Turkish can be both modifying and non-modifying. As possible factors which might be responsible for such variation, we discuss language contact, sociolinguistic differences between the speaker communities (Germany vs. the U.S.) and ...

The Nordic Association of Linguists (NAL) is the linguistics society of the five Nordic countries Denmark (with the Faeroes and Greenland), Finland (with Åland), Iceland, Norway, and Sweden. Founded in Austin, Texas in 1976, NAL went into operation in January 1977. It is a major organizational platform for Nordic linguists and language scholars as well as linguists outside the Nordic countries working on the languages of this particular geographical region. Two series of international conferences are organized under its auspices, the International Conference of Nordic and General Linguistics (ICNGL) and the Scandinavian Conference of Linguistics (SCL). Although oriented towards modern linguistics, the former conference series has traditionally tended to place a greater emphasis on the historical and descriptive study of the Scandinavian (i.e., North-Germanic) languages, whereas the latter one has been more concerned with general linguistic and theoretical issues and a wider range of languages. Beside an impressive string of conference proceedings, the major scholarly outlet of the Association is the Nordic Journal of Linguistics (NJL), since the beginning of 2003 brought out by the Cambridge University Press. The journal is open to contributions from all branches of linguistics, but gives priority to articles of a general theoretical and methodological nature and studies of the languages of the Nordic region. For a number of years (1977-2004), the Association also issued a news bulletin, the Nordic Linguistic Bulletin (NLB), until the spread of electronic communication made this form of news dissemination largely superfluous. This article traces the major issues and the main stages in the evolvement of the Association: the first tentative airings of the idea in the early 1970s, the preparatory work in the years 1972-1976, the launching of the Association in 1977, and its subsequent development through 2006. Appendices provide supplementary details as well as a bibliographical listing of conference proceedings and thematic journal issues.

The paper proposes a refined analysis of the semantics and pragmatics of the Norwegian non-truth-conditional adverb jo ‘after all, of course’. According to the literature, jo indicates that the proposition is ‘given’ in some sense or other. Based on new empirical investigations, we argue that the Relevance-theoretic notion mutual manifestness (Sperber & Wilson 1986/1995, Blass 2000) accurately captures the givenness aspect of jo, and we demonstrate through authentic examples what it means for a proposition to be mutually manifest. In addition to mutual manifestness, jo signals that the proposition is a premise for deriving a conclusion. The conclusion often – but not always – opposes someone’s view. We argue that the frequent opposition interpretations are a consequence of the nature of the procedures encoded by jo. In addition to clarifying the semantic and pragmatic properties of jo, the paper sheds light on the Relevance-theoretic notion procedural semantics as well as illustrati...

This paper explores issues of intersubjectivity and shared understanding as they arise in dyadic spoken interaction. Using data from Swedish conversations, we approach the topic by focusing on the functions of a reactive construction that occurs in situations when a linguistic expression (x) has been used in a prior utterance, and this expression is found to be only partially acceptable in the situation at hand. It is therefore reacted to by one of the interlocutors, and negotiated in a new turn initiated byx-å-x, i.e. a unit in which two identical copies ofxare conjoined byå‘and’, and then expanded by a supporting argument. The pragmatic functions of the construction include that of suggesting a sufficient clarification of what should be a reasonable situated meaning and an intersubjective basis for ensuing talk.

The second issue of Volume 41 (autumn 2018) of the Nordic Journal of Linguistics will be a special issue devoted to forensic linguistics in the Nordic countries and in Europe. The issue will be edited by Tanya Karoli Christensen and Sune Sønderberg Mortensen.

Keyword analysis has been used to investigate properties of style and genre, as a tool in discourse analysis, and as a method of identifying differences between the speech of distinct social groups. It has often been criticised as a blunt tool which can exaggerate what differences are present and fails to distinguish between quite distinct phenomena. However, it remains a very powerful tool for wide analysis of systematic differences between corporawhen usedwith sufficient scepticism. This paper uses keyword analysis to examine differences between the speech of male and female characters in the Íslendingasögur, narrative prose texts composed in Iceland in the 13th and 14th centuries. This dataset is of particular interest because such representations of speech are the only window on the language of social groups who were not involved in text production in medieval societies. It aims to demonstrate a rigorous application of keyword analysis, exemplifying what it can and, crucially, what it cannot show.

The article investigates the meeting between linguistics and literary theory under the auspices of cognitive grammar. First, it places this recent meeting in contrast to the relation between the two under structuralism; second, it sketches the philosophical foundations of cognitive linguistics in a series of related ideal types, such as cognitivism, diagrammatism, gestaltism, phenomenology, etc.; third, it investigates the literary theory of cognitive semantics in Lakoff and Turner's More Than Cool Reason as a background for some critical remarks.

Comparison of languages and linguistic data is essential if progress in our understanding of the nature of spoken languages is to be made. We understand phenomena better through comparison and contrast. This paper discusses problems that arise in trying to transfer a spoken language corpus transcribed and formatted according to one standard into the standard and format of another corpus. The problems that arise are related both to the differences that exist between the standards of the corpora and to human errors leading to lack of reliability in creating the transcriptions. Although the discussion is based on transfer and transliteration between two specific corpora (the Danish BySoc, BySociolingvistisk Korpus, and the Swedish GSLC, Göteborg Spoken Language Corpus), we believe that the discussion in the article documents and highlights problems of a general kind which have to be faced whenever spoken language corpora of different formats are to be compared.

The paper touches upon the relations between grammar-oriented and communication-oriented ways of analysing language in the light of some recent related developments in theoretical linguistics, congnitive psychology and artificial intelligence. The integration of (linguistic) meaning, situational interpretation and background knowledge is discussed. In Particular, different types of linguistically relevant common-sense knowledge and higher level cognitive procedures are considered.

This special issue of Nordic Journal of Linguistics is dedicated to the emerging field of forensic linguistics. There are competing definitions and delimitations of this term but here we will use it to refer to the investigation and elucidation of language evidence in a legal context. This includes the scrutiny of language data from different stages of the legal process, ranging from emergency calls to police interviews and courtroom interaction, as well as expert assessment and witness testimony in cases where the meaning or authorship of texts or utterances are questioned. While the analysis of authentic case data is often preferred or even required, access to such highly sensitive data types is naturally restricted by legal and ethical boundaries. An increasing amount of studies therefore employ experimental designs to test hypotheses and improve methodologies.

The paper presents examples of meta-morphomes (a kind of morphomic patterns, involving syncretisms) in North Germanic. There has been some debate over the notion of such patterns, and the aim is therefore to present relatively clear cases. Five cases are presented, involving inflection in verbs, nouns and adjectives. The syncretisms are all ‘unnatural’; they do not make much sense for syntax, semantics or phonology. While patterns that are obvious to the linguist are not necessarily obvious to speakers, the paper presents diachronic evidence that these morphomic patterns have been noticed by speakers. At least some criticism against ‘morphomic’ analyses is based on implausible premises: An analysis in terms of features is not automatically preferable only by being possible; the idea of ‘taking morphology seriously’ is untenable; the claim that the morphomic approach is a mere enumeration of facts may involve a self-contradiction.

The Danishstød, a kind of glottal prosody associated with certain syllables, as inbarʔn‘child’ (cf. stødlessbarnlig‘childish’), has long been the target of intense phonological investigation. In this paper, we show that its analysis requires an understanding of the prosodic constituent structure of Danish, and of the essential role of theperfect prosodic word(coextensive with one foot). After motivating this notion on independent grounds, both in other languages and in the context of acquisition, we show that the Danish stød system, analyzed in Optimality Theory, provides a window on the workings of the perfect prosodic word, regulating the presence and absence of stød in some of the much-discussed cases in the literature. In conclusion, we discuss the status of the perfect prosodic word in the light of recent developments in phonological theory, such as Match Theory.

This special issue of the Nordic Journal of Linguistics is devoted to receptive multilingualism (RM), and includes papers presented in the conference Receptive Multilingualism: Multilingual Resources in the Service of Mutual Understanding, held at the University of Eastern Finland, Joensuu, in 2015. RM refers to a language contact situation in which hearers’ or readers’ understanding of a non-native language is based on their skills in either their first language or languages that they have learned later in life. In such situations comprehension can be based on linguistic similarity of the languages, on acquired knowledge of the languages, or both. A particular characteristic of RM is its emphasis on receptive language skills: the hearer or the reader does not necessarily actively command the language they are able to understand. In its most interactive form RM refers to a situation in which every conversation participant can use their native language and be understood by the others.

We investigated the intelligibility of written Danish for Swedes, and in particular the role of inherited words compared to non-Germanic loanwords. To assess whether shared loanwords are easier to understand than inherited words, we conducted two experiments. First, we tested the intelligibility of isolated Danish words (inherited words and loanwords) among Swedes. Second, we constructed two versions of a reading test, one with a large percentage of loanwords and one with few loanwords. Our results show that it is easier for Swedish listeners to identify and understand Danish cognate loanwords than inherited words and that texts with many loanwords are easier to read than texts with few loanwords. We explain these results by the fact that (recent) loans in Swedish have diverged less and are therefore more similar to the Danish counterparts than inherited words.

Research on Western Armenian (WA) has described it as having a contrast between voiceless aspirated stops and voiced stops (Fairbanks 1948; Vaux 1998; Baronian 2017). Since there is no monolingual community of WA, all speakers are part of a minority language community, and also speak the majority language. The current study examines speakers from two heritage communities of WA: one in Lebanon, where the majority language is Arabic, and one in the US, where the majority language is English. The speakers in Lebanon were found to have a contrast between voiced and voiceless unaspirated stops, in line with Lebanese Arabic. The speakers in the US were more variable, some having the English pattern of voiceless unaspirated and voiceless aspirated stops, while others had voiceless aspirated stops, but their voiced stops were variable between voiced and voiceless unaspirated. These results indicate L2 transfer in both communities, leading to two different patterns of voicing in WA.

This article explores intraindividual microvariation in dialect syntax. We argue that in many cases the speaker has internalized a different (sub)grammar for each dialectal variety, in line with the hypothesis of universal bilingualism and parallel grammars argued for by Roeper (1999 et seq.). We discuss the question of how we can distinguish parallel grammars from optionality within one grammar, suggesting that the identification of correlating contextual factors might be a promising criterion. However, we also explore a more subtle type of variation, namely cases where a standard variety influences a potentially more vulnerable non-standard variety in a way that makes it exceedingly difficult for the language user and even for a trained linguist to discern what is what. We discuss whether or not these properties should be analysed as properties of another subgrammar (the standard grammar) or as fully integrated (albeit acquired) properties of the non-standard dialect.

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.