In this article, we report on a number of violations of (or exceptions to) the so-called V2 constraint in different variants of Icelandic. The main purpose is to investigate what these violations can tell us about the nature of the V2 constraint, its vulnerability, the limits of syntax, and about children’s ability to sort out what is relevant and what is not in the input they hear during the acquisition period. Three main explanatory possibilites are taken under consideration: the use and acceptance of sentences with V2 violations in Icelandic (i) is due to English influence, (ii) indicates an expansion of patterns existing in the language for language-internal reasons, (iii) is due to a task effect. In brief, our results support (i) for heritage Icelandic but not for non-heritage Icelandic, while different subsets of our data are best accounted for in terms of either (ii) or (iii).

This corpus study compares the use of Danish prepositions in the writing of L1 users of Danish to that of L2 users of Danish (with English as their L1). It examines to what extent non-standard usage is a specific L2 phenomenon and to what degree the challenges with prepositions are shared between the L1 and L2 group. We analyze the distribution and characteristics of non-standard usage involving four frequent Danish prepositions: til ‘to’, i ‘in’, på ‘on’, and for ‘for’. The results show that L2 texts are characterized by a larger share of non-standard tokens and by confusion of prepositions and non-prepositions. Yet, both L1 texts and L2 texts have non-standard usage and both have possible English calques. Based on the similarities between the two groups, we recommend that future studies include naturally occurring L1 production as a baseline for describing characteristics of L2 production.

Finnish nonfinite clauses constitute a complex grammatical class with a seemingly chaotic mix of verbal and nominal properties. Thirteen nonfinite constructions, their selection, control, thematic role assignment, nonfinite agreement, embedded subjects, and syntactic status were targeted for analysis. An analysis is proposed which derives their syntactic and semantic properties by relying on a computational model of human information processing. The model analyzes Finnish nonfinite constructions as truncated clauses with one functional layer above the verb phrase. Research methods from naturalistic cognitive science and computational linguistics are considered as potentially useful tools for linguistics.

The focus of this article is on OKAY as a resource for regulating language and constructing norm centres in authentic consultation meetings related to academic writing and recorded in Finland and Sweden. It gives an overview of all occurrences of OKAY in the interactional data in question, revealing that the word occurs frequently in academic writing consultations in Finnish, Finland Swedish, and Sweden Swedish. There are similarities in the frequency of its use and the distribution of occurrences between counsellor and student in the Finnish and the Finland-Swedish data, whereas the Sweden-Swedish counselling interactions follow a slightly different pattern. Through the lens of conversation analysis and systemic–functional linguistics, we further demonstrate how the counsellors and the students use the evaluative content word OKAY as a resource for regulating both academic writing and the counselling interaction, and thereby position themselves epistemically and orient towards different centres of norms.

Decades of research on bilingual grammars corroborate the integrated nature of these systems, leading to the conjecture that these representations are ‘shared’ (Marian & Spivey 2003, Kroll & Gollan 2014, Putnam et al. 2018). A specific population of bilinguals, namely heritage language speakers, shows a tendency for highly variable allomorphy (Polinsky 2018, Putnam et al. 2021); however, with this aspect of grammar that is often in a state of flux, there are instances of stability. Here we thoroughly investigate the stability of tense allomorphy of in North American Norwegian (NAmNo), a moribund heritage language spoken in the Upper Midwestern United States. Formally, we build upon initial observations provided by Lykke (2020), showing how a late-insertion approach to the syntax–phonological interface in combination with events, features, and precedence (EFP) phonology (Raimy 2000, Papillon 2020, Idsardi 2022) provides a straightforward account of the structural complexities that determine exponency in bilingual grammars.

This study presents results of two experiments using supervised machine-learning models to examine individual Finnish speakers’ dialectal backgrounds. Data come from interviews conducted with heritage speakers of Finnish in northern Wisconsin and are compared to data from the Finnish Dialect Syntax Archive. The models were constructed and then, following successful validation testing, used to identify the dialectal background of five individual American Finnish speakers. Results showed individual variation in dialectal backgrounds and some correlation to speakers’ likely language input. Our approach offers a new methodological tool for examining speakers’ dialectal backgrounds in situations of language contact.

This paper gives a broad overview of how Norwegian productively makes use of L-reduplication to convey diminutive meaning. I argue that this previously undescribed phenomenon is a diminutivizing process that copies the stressed vowel and any consonants until the next morpheme boundary. The construction can be attested as far back as the start of the 20th century and its realization varies geographically between two main variants. I show that L-reduplication is restricted phonologically, but applies productively (unlike other echo reduplicative processes) across different parts of speech.

This article introduces the Finnish Corpus of Online Registers (FinCORE) representing the full range of registers – situationally defined text varieties such as news and blogs – on the Finnish Internet. The extreme range of language use found online has challenged the study of registers. It has been unclear what registers the entire Internet includes, and if they can be sufficiently defined to allow for their analysis or classification, previous studies focusing on restricted sets of registers and English. FinCORE features 10,754 texts from the unrestricted web, manually annotated for their register using a scheme originally established for the Corpus of Online Registers of English (CORE). We present the FinCORE registers and compare them to CORE. Finally, we show that the FinCORE registers are sufficiently well-defined to allow for their automatic identification, thus opening novel possibilities for both linguistics and web-as-corpus research. FinCORE is published under an open license.

This contribution focuses on Stroh-Wollin’s (2020 in NJL) etymologies of the Nordic definite articles enn and hinn and contrastive hinn/hitt. While I do not contest her central claim that Old Icelandic enn and Mainland Scandinavian hinn have separate historical origins, I do argue that her etymologies should not be accepted over more conventional ones already present in the literature. First, the etymology of enn should, along traditional lines, be connected to Germanic cognates such as Gothic jain-, German jen-, and English yon (rather than derived from an ancient PIE *eno-). 1 Furthermore, contrastive hinn/hitt and definite hinn/hit should be considered a doublet, both ultimately deriving from a distal/contrastive element (rather than the article having separate origins in an innovated Proto-Nordic proximal demonstrative).

Focusing on the expression of manner and path in the ‘frog story’ narrations of Estonian native speakers, this study shows that Estonian – a morphologically rich satellite-framed Finno-Ugric language – is characterised by high manner and high path salience. Furthermore, when analysing one of the core qualities of manner – speed – we show that when the participants were asked to narrate a story as if the events developed slowly, they also spoke slowly and their stories tended to be long (both in time duration and word count) and include many details. When they were asked to tell the story as if the events developed fast, they also spoke faster and used more verbs of caused motion and verbs of vertical motion. Thus, the speed of motion in the physical world seems to be mimicked by speech rate, indicating mental simulation and iconic prosody. The exact nature of speed effects in linguistic choices for expressing motion remains to be studied in future works.

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.

The Estonian indefinite pronouns keegi ‘someone’ and miski ‘something’ are distinguished by being able to refer to animate or inanimate entities, respectively. However, in certain Estonian dialects, keegi is used to refer to inanimate entities as well. The aim of this paper is to describe the functions and use of keegi based on the data in the Corpus of Estonian Dialects. We used statistical analyses to determine which dialects typically use keegi to refer to inanimate entities and which variables (polarity, function, position in the clause, case marking) contribute most to this variation. The results show that there are significant differences between the dialects: keegi is mostly used to refer to inanimate entities in the northern dialects (most frequently in the Western, Mid, and Eastern dialects), but this phenomenon is rare or non-existent in the southern dialects. All of the variables studied contribute to this variation: keegi is most likely to refer to an inanimate being when it is in the partitive case, functions as an object, a partitive subject, or a negative polarity item, and is positioned at the end of a negative clause.

Despite many attempts, we do not yet know how to answer the question exhaustively and adequately: What is common Danish stød phonetically? Specifically, is there an underlying physiological constancy behind the considerable acoustic variability? And is there a common denominator to the different acoustic manifestations that might explain their perceptual equivalence? Systematic acoustic, physiological, and perceptual investigations of common Danish stød now span (a little more than) three quarters of a century. This is a review of that research, to determine what may be considered established phonetic facts about common Danish stød and the open questions that remain for future research.

This paper presents a usage-based cognitive approach to the different rates at which Icelandic masculine forms in nominative/accusative plural -ur are reanalysed as feminine. Of the 14.92% of nouns in plural -ur, 91.89% are feminine, others masculine. Syncretism in nominative/accusative plural is exceptionless among feminines, but relatively rare among masculines. Interestingly, plurals such as masculine eigendur ‘owners’, fætur ‘feet’, vetur ‘winters’ occasionally yield the feminine outputs definite eigendur-nar, fætur-nar, vetur-nar, and are sometimes modified by feminine forms of adjectives and determiners. As the full set of forms in plural -ur is highly schematic, we might expect reanalysis – viewed as a property of a schema’s productivity – to correlate proportionately with the frequency of corresponding masculine forms. However, corpus data for Icelandic betray a mismatch. Through a network model approach that emphasises prototype structure, minimal schematicity is shown to impact the rate of reanalysis by means of a gang effect.

Coreference processing of Control constructions and their pronoun-containing counterparts can be studied experimentally using priming or interference paradigms. We replicate findings in a priming study on non-finite Control constructions in Norwegian (Larsen & Johansson, 2020) and contrast them with their finite counterparts using interference effects in a grammatical maze (G-maze) design. We asked participants to read sentences word-by-word and to select the grammatically correct continuation from two options. When the ungrammatical option was a potential antecedent from within the sentence, we predicted interference, i.e., longer reaction times compared to an unrelated baseline. We observed a trend towards significant interference effects when a participant was presented with either of the potential noun phrase (NP) antecedents of PRO in competition with the infinitive marker (test position zero) during the processing of a Control sentence. This indicates reactivation of potential antecedents at the infinitive marker, and a reactivation position (PRO) near or at the infinitive marker. We also observed significant differences between Control constructions and their pronoun counterparts. A significant interference effect was recorded for Subject Pronoun constructions when either potential NP antecedent of the pronoun was presented in competition with the pronoun itself. A similar trend was recorded for Object Pronoun sentences.

Ausbau processes increase differences between two close written language varieties. Finnish and Kven are considered two ausbau languages today, in contrast to an earlier view which considered Kven to be a dialect of Finnish. In this article, ausbau processes are illustrated by comparing the use of eera verbs, a group constituting international and Scandinavian loanwords in the two languages. Most eera verbs were purged from Modern Written Finnish and they are expressed via other means today. By contrast, Kven accepts eera verbs in the same way as Old Written Finnish. Purism – perceived as avoidance of certain linguistic elements – is the explanation behind ausbau processes in this case, and purist attitudes reflect the identities of language planners. Eera verbs represent a small corner of language, yet their use differentiates Kven from Modern Written Finnish, and underscores the independence of Kven as a separate language.

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.

Research has shown the importance of vocabulary development in relation to other parts of language development, e.g. grammar and reading development. Cross-linguistic research has shown similar as well as dissimilar tendencies regarding content in different languages. This study examines, for the first time, the characteristics of Faroese children’s early productive vocabulary utilizing a Faroese adaptation of the MacArthur–Bates Communicative Development Inventories (MB-CDI). The study participants were 415 children aged 8 to 20 months. The results provide information on the composition and characteristics of lexical development in Faroese children and demonstrate that nouns are dominant among first words, as are onomatopoetic words and words describing family relationships. Faroese children are comparable to children learning other languages with respect to rate of acquisition and composition of words, with a somewhat higher share of words describing family members as stable words in the emerging language.