The typological variation between the Nordic languages offers a “natural laboratory” for the cross-linguistic study of first language acquisition. Based on an on-going inter-Nordic project, the present article discusses research designs for the exploration of this laboratory together with pilot analyses of acquisition data across Danish, Finnish, Icelandic, Norwegian and Swedish. On the basis of evidence from longitudinal case studies, from narrative tasks, and from morphological and phonetic experiments, the project aims at producing an integrated picture of the development of grammatical morphology and its interaction with (a) the semantic domains of spatial and temporal relations and (b) the prosodic domains of tonal word accents and duration. In the present article the focus is on spatial relations and prosody. Comparisons of developmental data between languages that show considerable typological differences (Finnish vs Icelandic vs the Mainland Scandinavian languages) allow us to establish broad cross-linguistic commonalities in acquisition structure. It is shown that, across all five languages, very similar relational concepts are encoded by the first grammatical morphemes emerging in the field of spatial relations. The impact of linguistic details on acquisition structure can be explored with greater precision through comparisons between languages that show minimal typological differences (the internal differences between the Mainland Scandinavian languages: Danish vs Norwegian vs Swedish). Here, the early development of the Verb + particle construction in two Danish and two Swedish children is analysed. Language-specific effects on acquisition structure of syntactical and prosodic traits are demonstrated. Further, language-specific effects on the development of verb argument structure in spatial descriptions are discussed.

A right-dislocated phrase in Norwegian is either a full lexical phrase of the canonical sort, which is richer in semantic content than its coreferential intraclausal partner, or it is a pronoun which adds no semantic content that was not already present in the coreferential intraclausal phrase. A frequently occurring subcategory of right dislocation in Norwegian involves a lexical phrase in situ and a coreferential dislocated pronoun. While an afterthought analysis of pronominal right-dislocated items may easily be dismissed offhand, an afterthought account of the canonical type of Norwegian right dislocation may seem initially plausible. However, on the basis of prosodic, syntactic and pragmatic criteria it is argued that there is no viable afterthought analysis of any subtype of right dislocation in Norwegian.

A number of typical particle verbs in Swedish and English are presented and it is noted that such verbs are often forgotten in dictionaries and not given the proper treatment in grammars. One problem is the identification of these verbs, another is the fact that the verb and the particle may be separated by other words. The particle verbs must therefore be treated as discontinuous lexical items. It is shown that the phrase structure rules used in Swetra Referent Grammar can make room for lexical material at several places in the word string, if this is required by the lexical matrix. English and Swedish examples are presented and also the automatic translation of some simple sentences