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In this paper I will show that it is possible to extract elements from an embedded root clause in a V2 language, provided that the deleted copy is spelled out in a high position. However, if the embedded clause does not have V0-to-C0 movement, no deleted copy can be spelled out. This difference falls out naturally from the assumption that embedded root clauses must be thematically complete and that in the case of movement chains, the foot of the chain cannot be spelled out. This paper is a detailed study of extraction strategies in Norwegian, based on a corpus of 1329 informants. Its novelty lies in combining the study of extraction strategies with the presence of resumptive elements in the embedded clause.

This paper summarizes recent research on heritage language anxiety (HLA) that three generations of the Turkish immigrant community in the Netherlands experience in their daily lives. Through an interdisciplinary perspective, it integrates an extended questionnaire (n=113), semi-structured interviews (n=30), and an experiment (n=30) in which physiological responses (i.e. electrodermal activity) are measured during a video-retelling task conducted in monolingual and bilingual modes. Findings illustrate the complex interplay of daily sociolinguistic and socio-emotional challenges, HLA and physiological reactions. In its application of interdisciplinary research, the paper provides a more integrative glimpse into the multifaceted dimensions that underpin heritage language anxiety, particularly in the immigrant context.

This paper presents textography as a research strategy in writing research that enables texts and their surrounding contexts, practices and the relationships between these to be examined in detail. In order to illustrate the potential of textography, the paper explores how textography could be used to examine the relationships between writing in higher education and writing in the workplace. The paper argues that the time is ripe for the investigation of study-workplace connections for writing in plurilingual settings, such as in Nordic contexts.

The present paper presents the contrastive background and the basic objectives of a cross-linguistic research project (POSS) that takes an L2-oriented perspective on possessives in English, Norwegian, German, French and selected Slavic languages. Our paper focuses on L1/L2 pairs involving Norwegian as L2 or L1. Section 1 outlines the rationale behind our project. The morphosyntactic (‘core’) systems of English, French, German, Norwegian and Russian 3rd possessives are described and compared in section 2 while section 3 draws attention to dimensions of contrasts that fall outside the scope of our project. Section 4 specifically addresses the L2 issue, presenting for selected L1/L2 pairs our basic assumptions concerning challenges to the acquisition of the L2 possessive core system. Section 5 contains a concluding summary.

The aim of this paper is to describe the system behind personal names in Hadiyya. The bulk of the paper analyses the semantics of personal names. Hadiyya personal names express social, economic and political circumstances accompanying the birth of a child. Name givers express their wishes, desires and emotions through personal names. The close examination of names over generations indicates a gradual shift from typical Had-iyya names to modified Amharic-based names. Since the advent of Christianity in the region, Biblical names have also become common. The historical underpinnings for the shift to Amharic-based and Biblical names are language and cultural contact. All Hadiyya personal names display vowel endings that mark case and gender. Like other nouns in the language, per-sonal names can have simple, derived or compound form. Interestingly, most Hadiyya personal names can be translated freely with relative or agentive readings. Personal names can have a perfective reading describing past experience or an imperfective reading expressing wishes for the future. Though Hadiyya is a morphologically complex language and hence all the above grammatical notions are overtly marked, they are omitted in the morphology of personal names. The use of inflectional and derivational morphemes is minimal. Hadiyya personal names are therefore special word classes that tend to display a simplified morphosyntactic structure and free translation.

This paper describes two machine translation tasks that require language expertise: (1) paraphrasing as a technique to prepare texts for translation and a method for linguistic quality assurance, and (2) the evaluation of translation produced by machine translation systems. These tasks will be exemplified through support verb constructions, a subtype of multiword units that machine translation systems have difficulty translating. The paper raises awareness of the need to integrate enhanced linguistic knowledge in machine translation systems and the need to place the human factor as a core value in order to ensure translation quality.

This paper contrasts some texts that deal with the history of the terminology research in Brazil, especially the research aimed to extract or recognize terminology in corpora, a widespread practice among us only from the year 2000, with pioneering texts on this topic produced by Portuguese researchers, represented here by Belinda Maia. The intention is to recognize her role as disseminator of the corpus-based methodologies. The paper follows showing how the dialogue between the Terminology studies from Brazil and Portugal is important for the promotion of Portuguese language in the global scenario of scientific and technical communication.

This paper reports on a contrastive study of semantic prosody in English and Norwegian. Semantic prosody refers to the communicative function of extended units of meaning (Sinclair 1996, Stubbs 2013), i.e. «the semantic prosody of an item is the reason why it is chosen, over and above the semantic preferences that also characterise it» (Sinclair 1998: 20), where an item is equated with the sequence of words constituting an extended unit of meaning. The paper presents three case studies of English units with an established negative prosody containing the core items ‘commit’, ‘signs of’ and ‘utterly’. The Norwegian correspondences of these items are identified on the basis of a bidirectional corpus, viz. the English-Norwegian Parallel Corpus. These correspondences serve as the starting point for an investigation of cross-linguistic prosodies. It is shown that while units with ‘commit’ and ‘signs of’ have good Norwegian matches in terms of semantic prosody, units with ‘utterly’ are less stable across the two languages, underlining the importance of carrying out studies of this kind in order to improve the cross-linguistic understanding of extended units of meaning. This in turn has implications for how teachers, translators and lexicographers choose to present words in isolation or as part of larger, extended units.

It is well known that some kinds of expressions with so-called “have” and “be” verbs behave differently across languages, as is the case with Portuguese and Norwegian ‘tenho medo/pena’ (have) or ‘være redd/lei’ (be). But to what extent is this difference important for the translation of this class of verbs (given that there are a few that literally correspond to English ‘be’ and ‘have’, in the two languages)? In this paper I discuss what a corpus of (student) translations between Portuguese and Norwegian (PoNTE) can tell us about eight very frequent verbs (five Portuguese and three Norwegian), that range from auxiliaries to full lexical verbs,and which stand out as some of the most challenging ones to learn for foreign learners. After presenting an overview of their occurrence, in original and translated text, I go deeper into the functions of the Portuguese verbs by classifying every case in the source texts according to fifteen categories, thereby providing an interesting bird’s eye view of their distribution. I then narrow my study down to the cases where feelings or sensations or moral judgements are expressed, and present their full range of translations to illustrate the many issues involved. I end the paper on the subject of translation complexities by presenting further interesting cases involving (the translation of) these verbs.

One of the functions of names in literary texts is Akzentuierung — Anonymisierung (accentuating — anonymizing) (Debus, 2002, 84). By giving a character a certain name, an author can accentuate that name and that character; conversely, by not providing a name where a name could be expected, an author can keep that person anonymous. Both approaches are deviations from ‘normality’. This paper proposes that the accentuating and anonymizing function of literary names can be closely linked to the idea of ‘foregrounding’ as developed in stylis- tic research. To illustrate this, this paper presents an analysis of the accentuating and anonymizing use of personal names in the novel Beyond Sleep (1966) by Willem Frederik Hermans (1921–1995), one of the most important 20th-century Dutch literary authors. This paper shows that the stylistic application of names that have an accentuating or anonymizing function is key to sustaining the plot of Beyond Sleep.

This paper discusses if place names can be used to construct and express identity, with a focus on the Norwegian names of farms and parishes. Since the Norwegian Place Name Act came into existence in 1991, the many appeals in regard to official spellings as decided by the authorities give clear indication that Norwegians have different opinions of how the names of farms and parishes should be spelled compared to names referring to natural features. Many people prefer the spelling of names of natural features to be as close as possible to the dialectal pronunciation, whereas they prefer older, often ornamental spellings or spellings which differ from the pronunciation when it comes to the names of farms and parishes. This paper looks at the reasons for these attitudes towards the spelling of place names, and is highlighted by some theory pertaining to language and identity.

This paper discusses various approaches to the topic "place names and identities", addressing the meaning of place names, their role as links to the past as well as their identity-building capacity. The author argues that there is an intimate relationship between place and place name, and he discusses how place names may reflect or give rise to feelings of individual and collective identity attached to the places in question. Three particular personal experiences of the identity role of place names are given, two at the beginning of the paper and one in the conclusion.

This paper is about feature names in Zimbabwe. It focuses on the role played by place names in defining Zimbabwe, both as a physical entity and as a community of speakers with a remarkable history and a sense of nationhood. The paper thus focuses on two types of place names, that is, those that refer to the natural landscape, such as mountains and rivers, as well as those that refer to man-made features such as roads and streets, hospitals and schools. Regarding names that are bestowed onto the features of the natural landscape, we will look at how some place names vividly describe the outstanding features or characteristics of particular geographical features, that is, the extent to which the names are used as tools in describing the features; the way the eye meets the landscape. We will also look at how some names of physical features are coined in response to the landscape's 'behaviour' or in relation to the link the landscape has with historical event(s). The paper will also look at how the bestowal of commemorative names on Zimbabwean features has been used in concretising the Zimbabwean people's link with the country's history, that is, how Zimbabweans have tried to define themselves as a people through naming some of their popular places after names of the country's heroes and heroines, both living and dead.

This paper aims to investigate the options of –nie/tie nominalization chosen by various verbal stems in Russian, as far as these options can be seen on the texts of the Russian National Corpus. The paper is in some sense an addition to Sergei Tatevosov (2009, 2011) in that it is an attempt to look beyond the grammar restrictions outlined in these works.

Russian semelfactive verbs formed with the suffix -nu- are well-known in the literature (Isachenko 1960; Maslov 1948, 1965; Zaliznjak & Šmelev 2000). However, the distribution between two semelfactive suffixes -nu- and -anu- is less studied. Makarova & Janda (2009, 90) suggest that “there is no clear trend concerning the frequency of -nu- vs. -anu-”, so the nature of the distribution between the two semelfactive suffixes remains unresolved. In this paper we explore 2041 semelfactive verbs from the Russian National Corpus (RNC1) produced with the two suffixes and show that: 1) distribution of the two suffixes partly depends on the number of the syllables in the base, 2) suffix -anu- is more recent and most monosyllabic roots are currently undergoing a shift from -nu- to -anu-, and 3) prefixed verbs most frequently choose the -nu- semelfactive suffix, because the pairing of a prefix and a root functions as multisyllabic base. These principles function as tendencies and we do not postulate a clear-cut division. This paper is written within the theoretical framework of Cognitive Linguistics, which allows us to fully capture the complex distribution of the two suffixes.

This paper proposes a formal semantic approach to Slavic verbal prefixes. A hypothesis is put forward according to which a verbal prefix imposes a relation between two degrees on a scale. One is a degree associated with the event denoted by the verbal predicate. The other one is the standard of comparison, contributed by a linguistic expression that appears in the sentence, or by the context. The scale to which the prefix applies is most typically contributed by the linguistic environment in which the prefix appears. The paper demonstrates how the proposed analysis applies to two specific morphemes in Russian: the prefixes pod- and do-.

In Old High German, verb-initial matrix declarative clauses display a variety of functions which are broadly related to discourse structure. However, the tho-V2 construction also correlates with the factors triggering verb-initial placement. The paper shows that the preference of the one pattern over the other cannot be explained in terms of a single, straightforward criterion. Rather, several factors influencing the choice process are recognized in the literature. The paper tests the effect of these factors by using methods and tools developed to capture variability in sociolinguistics.

This volume presents papers from the International Workshop on Indo-European Syntax held at the University of Georgia in Athens,Georgia in May 2009. The workshop was a cooperative effort between the Pragmatic Resources in Old Indo-European Languages (PROIEL) project at the University of Oslo and the University of Georgia. The papers in the volume study the interaction between syntax and discourse structure in various old Indo-European languages, in most cases with an explicitly contrastive focus.

This paper describes the meanings and uses of "afinal" in contemporary European Portuguese. The data were collected from a newspaper corpus, available on-line (http://acdc.linguateca.pt). Within a cognitive-functional framework, I argue that there is a basic prototypical temporal meaning from which emerge other meanings, pragmatically motivated. "Afinal" undergoes a grammaticalization process, which involves syntactic reanalysis (adverb > discourse marker) and semantic change (a shift from a contentful function to procedural ones). Throughout the paper, I check the possibility of replacing "afinal" by "ao fim e ao cabo" and "no fim de contas", in order to highlight their functional differences.

In this paper I present briefly Linguateca, an infrastructure project for Portuguese which is over ten years old, showing how it provides several possibilities to study grammatical and semantical differences between varieties of the language. After a short history of Portuguese corpus linguistics, presenting the main projects in the area, I discuss in some detail the AC/DC project and what is called the AC/DC cluster (encompassing other related corpus projects sharing the same core). Emphasizing its potential for language variation studies, the paper also (i) describes CONDIVport's integration as an impetus for new capabilities, and (ii) provides a sketch of newly added functionalities to AC/DC.

The paper is focused on predications with incremental arguments, for example, drinking tea, eating ice-cream, but also handing out books or throwing away letters, when these predications are understood in a temporal distributive way, that is, when the entities denoted are consecutively involved in the situation. Predications with an incremental argument denote situations where there is a certain parallelism between the temporal duration of the situation on the one hand, and the increase or the decrease of the amount denoted by the incremental argument on the other. The more time one spends drinking one’s tea, the less tea remains in the cup. Predications denoting an incremental relation have been comprehensively discussed in formal semantics, and also from other perspectives. Here, it has been observed that neither in English nor in Russian the predications with an incremental argument can be coded as “ongoing”, as progressive, if the incremental argument is related to a bounded amount. Indeed, using the progressive form in an example such as Masha is drinking two cups of tea without further context can be understood only in such a way as to mean that Masha is drinking her tea alternately from both cups. The same is true for Russian if we use the imperfective aspect in its progressive reading. In Russian too, the equivalent example Maša p’et dve čaški čaja cannot be understood in such a way as to mean that Masha is drinking one cup after the other. So it may seem that a progressive coding of a situation and progressive coding of an incremental argument denoting a bounded amount are mutually exclusive. In this paper, I would like to describe in more detail when and why progressive coding of a situation and progressive coding of an incremental argument denoting a bounded quantity are mutually exclusive. In particular, I would like to show and explain why this restriction is not valid if the quantity of the amount denoted is known at the very beginning of the situation. For instance, if in our example Masha is drinking her two cups of tea/Maša p’et svoi dve čaški čaja the incremental argument is introduced with a possessive pronoun such as her/svoi and is thus related to an amount already specified in the context.

This paper provides a detailed analysis of pragmatic particularities of the Russian functional word odnako. I claim that most Russian-German dictionaries have failed to account for the meaning of this word. Authors of bilingual dictionaries typically follow their own intuition and provide some accidental examples instead of pursuing a semantic analysis. I propose to use well-known methods in the study of polysemy such as Eve Sweetser's Three-level Approach to the description of functional words. More specifically, I divide odnako into three big groups according to its functions: connective, modal and communicative. The special object of investigation in this paper is its connective function. An analysis of Russian and German examples will show how the pragmatic context can influence the semantic meaning and the function of the connective.

This paper provides an analysis of the idiom Alpha and Omega. The paper shows that there are subtle differences between the range of usages for this idiom in languages such as Russian, English and German.

Why is it that the lexicon is often shunned and ignored by linguists, or in other words, treated with disdain and generally considered to be the Ugly Duckling of the linguistic family? This paper is both an attempt to redress the balance and it is designed as a tentative, initial contribution to the study of verbs of sound. Here, the central focus is devoted to a small subsection of verbs of sound, namely to the verbs denoting animal sounds used with metaphorical reference to human beings. The paper also attempts to sketch possible situations and parameters which are relevant for human beings and which appear to be cross-linguistic universals. The discussion is for the most part focused on Russian but examples from other languages, such as English, German, Estonian, and so forth, are also included.

In this paper, I will examine a specialty of colloquial Russian - the omission of verbs - and compare it to the possibilities of verb omission in Czech, where this phenomenon is rather rare. The omissions in question are to be separated from compulsory ellipses, which will not be taken into account in this paper. They are also not to be regarded as zero lexemes, which are elusive to attempts of reconstruction. The nature of this third kind of omission itself presents a frame for the comparison, since these omissions can be placed along two scales, that of AMBIGUOUS/VAGUE VS. UNEQUIVOCALLY RECOVERABLE and FREE FORMATION VS. PHRASEOLOGICALLY BOUND PHRASE. The comparison of verb omissions in the two languages along these scales emphasizes the restrictions of omissions in Czech and the high degree of freedom in Russian. Moreover, verb omissions in Russian can lead to changes in the meaning of a sentence, whereas they seem to be merely a stylistic device in Czech.

The present paper reports on an experiment in which the use of possessives is investigated in an interpreting task from English to Polish. The English possessive determiner system is neutral with respect to the syntactic position of the antecedent possessor, while Polish distinguishes lexically between locally bound – i.e. reflexive – and non-reflexive possessive modifiers. The interpreter therefore has to ‘compute’ mentally the syntactic position of the antecedent possessor in order to make the correct choice in Polish as the target language. The study shows that this is cognitively a very demanding task in simultaneous interpreting, as many errors as well as self-corrections occur. The study furthermore shows that interpreters adapt their language to their audience, and adequate omissions, as well as correct form of the possessive occur more often when they have a group of engineers in mind than when they interpret for language specialists. We understand this to mean that the cognitive complexity of solving the cross-linguistic asymmetry in the possessive system causes more errors when the interpreter stays closer to the source text in speaking to language specialists.

Research on non-native pronoun resolution has predominantly been concerned with (i) ‘ordinary’ 3rd person pronouns/anaphors like En. "he", "she", "they" or "himself", "herself", "themselves", (ii) language pairs involving English as the native (L1) or the foreign (L2) language, and (iii) the role that binding constraints and syntactic structure in general play in L2 versus L1 processing. The present paper – a follow-up study to Pitz et al. (2017) – deviates from this trend in all three respects: We investigate how L1-Norwegian learners of L2-German interpret the two German possessive pronouns/determiners "sein" (≈ his) and "ihr" (≈ her or their), arguing that lexical divergence between the possessive systems, and in particular the formal similarity between binding-neutral L2-German "sein" and the L1-Norwegian reflexive possessive "sin", may enhance or interfere with L2 comprehension, depending on the structural conditions. In Section 2 we briefly present the two possessive systems. Section 3 summarizes relevant research on pronoun resolution, with a special view to possessives. Sections 4–6 present a pilot study on L1-Norwegian learners’ grammaticality judgments of "sein" and "ihr" in simple sentences (Sect. 5) and a forced-choice resolution experiment involving a group of L1-Norwegian learners with a background two or three years’ teaching of L2-German at high-school level and a control group of native speakers of German (Sect. 6). The final Section 7 provides a summary and concluding discussion of our findings.

This paper presents first findings from an offline study of Czech native speakers’ use and interpretation of reflexive and non-reflexive possessive pronouns. The study is part of a larger possessive project outlined by Fabricius-Hansen et al. (2017), leaning on the comprehension experiment presented in Pitz et al. (2017). The study encompasses questionnaire data collected from 259 informants who were tested under four different conditions on two competing pronouns: the reflexive possessive (svůj) and the 3rd person non-reflexive possessive (jeho). The results revealed that Czech native speakers show a strong uncertainty when interpreting constructions with a cataphoric non-reflexive possessive. This shows that even for native speakers, the establishment of the anaphoric and cataphoric relations under certain syntactic conditions is a challenging and highly complex task. With these results, several hypotheses are formulated in various target-source-language pairs concerning the processing of reflexive and non-reflexive possessives in L2.

The paper accounts for an unexpected embedded present tense, which denotes a future time in French relative clauses. The matrix displays either the periphrastic future or the simple future. In both cases, one can arguably decompose the matrix into a present tense feature and a forward shifter. This move leads to an analysis of the morphology encountered in the relative clause as an instance of Sequence of tense.

This paper provides an overview of Germanic languages as heritage languages, i.e. languages acquired naturalistically by children in parts of the world where these languages are not the majority language. Summarizing research on different types of heritage speakers of Danish, German, Icelandic, Norwegian, and Swedish, we identify certain stable and vulnerable domains. We focus on the so far best studied areas, word order and grammatical gender, adding evidence from other lesser studied domains, such as definiteness and phonology. We propose that in addition to the linguistic make-up of the phenomena in question, the size of the heritage community and, relatedly, opportunities to use the language need to be taken into account. The latter may explain, for example, why moribund varieties of German and the Scandinavian languages in North America appear to be less stable than the language of second-generation heritage speakers in Europe.

This paper provides a first picture of discourse marking in American Norwegian, drawing on word order data and native speaker judgments. Like many others since Salmons (1990), we see convergence between the systems of bilinguals, increasing similarities at the expense of differences. Matras (1988) and Fuller (2001) argue that more ‘pragmatically detachable’ material is more easily borrowed, like well / vel vs. you know / vet du. Our results partially align with this expectation, but with a wrinkle: less pragmatically detachable material appears to be borrowed where the two languages have similar pre-existing markers (namely vet du / you know). We find more convergence, regardless of detachability, at points of similarity than of difference (e.g. English anyhow, which has no close Norwegian parallel.) This suggests that convergence may play the bigger role here, so that less detachable forms may be more borrowable in converging systems.

This paper investigates spontaneous production from 50 speakers of Norwegian heritage language in the Corpus of American Nordic Speech and studies the interplay between four linguistic properties: possessives and double definiteness, verb second word order, grammatical gender, and the amount of language mixing. It is shown that speakers cluster in the sense that some speakers produce more Norwegian-like structures across properties, whereas others produce more English-like structures across the same properties. Implications for the study of heritage grammars are also addressed.

In this paper, we investigate the research question ‘How are female dialect users from former industrial areas depicted in the media?’ by comparing media representations from two former industrial areas, namely Heerlen/Parkstad in the Netherlands and Østfold in Norway. Both representations are parodic and can be characterised as ‘high performances’ (Johnstone 2011, p. 658), and we argue that these performances are informed by the class-divided, previously industrial societies in Heerlen/Parkstad and Østfold. Our results show that being local seems to conflict with normative conceptions of femininity in these representations.

This paper is concerned with pronominal demonstatives (referred to as psychologically distal demonstratives by Johannessen 2008a, b) in older Norwegian spoken language, and written Swedish from the 19th century and the present-day. We show that pronominal demonstratives can be attested in speakers born in different parts of Norway in the 19th century, and in Swedish texts from the same period. However, the pronominal forms do not seem to be used in precisely the same way in the two languages. In Swedish, han/hon ‘he/she’ do not seem to behave formally like demonstratives. Instead, we propose that they are syntactically reduced pronouns at the edge of the DP, above the position for demonstratives, and that they double features lower down in the noun phrase. In Norwegian, on the other hand, han/hun are used as demonstratives already in the 19th century, in the way described for present-day Norwegian by Johannessen (2008a, b).

Several Semitic and Germanic languages, just as languages belonging to other language families (Slovenian, Korean), embed imperatives and thus use direct speech in syntactical context, where most other languages would use subordinate clauses. This kind of embedding can entail “shifting indexicals” and “imposters”, i.e. the reference to one and the same person with different persons in the verbal and pronominal system, even within one and the same phrase. In this paper, departing from the Germanic and other data presented so far in this context, I attempt a descriptive analysis of this phenomenon focusing on Semitic, with only hints to elements of a formal analysis.

The topic of the paper is a small group of Norwegian dialects where lenition of p, t, k into b, d, g in intervocalic and word-final position is limited to words characterized by a monomoraic, stressed syllable in Old Norse. These dialects are spoken in the easternmost local communities in Agder county, at the eastern margin of the South-Norwegian lenition areas where lenition hit all short oral stops irrespective of preceding vowel length. After the quantity shift had made all stressed vowels bimoraic, with rimes being either VV or VC, the distribution of the lenited plosives are after both long and short vowels (the main area) or after short vowels only (the eastern marginal area). Haslum (2004) argues that the limited distribution in the east ist the result of a reversal after long vowels only. While this cannot be refuted as a possibility, I argue below that it may also be the result of a two-stage process, whereby lenition after a short vowel has spread further than the generalized process.

This paper analyses tense marking in Norwegian chess columns, a specific genre that reports mainly two kinds of events: actual chess moves played in the game under discussion vs. counterfactual, alternative chess moves discussed by the chess pundit. This narrow context is ideally suited for pragmatic competition. It is shown that Norwegian chess writers typically use the unmarked indicative present tense in reference to counterfactual chess moves. The present tense form contrasts with the marked past tense used for actual and anaphoric refer-ence. From a production perspective the simple unmarked present is preferred over morpho-syntactically heavy competitors (composite tenses and modals) with explicit marking of counterfactuality.

In this paper I investigate the alternation between VO and OV word order in spoken North Sami, based on data from LIA Sápmi – Sámegiela hállangiellakorpus. My results show that VO in general is the most frequent word order. However, I also find many instances of SAuxOV order in my material, particularly in sentences with periphrastic verb forms where the main verb is in the infinitive (that is, modal constructions) and where the object is a pronoun. In addition, I also find some cases where the object precedes both the auxiliary and the main verb, but crucially without being topicalized to clause-initial position. Based on the account of Norwegian Object Shift in Bentzen and Anderssen (2019), I suggest that OV word order in North Sami may be analyzed as IP-internal topicalization, where objects that are familiar in the context may move to a thematic position between VP and TP. This will account for the OV pattern with periphrastic tense forms. Furthermore, I suggest that there is an additional higher IP-internal topic position, and that object movement to this position is what results in OV with finite main verbs. This higher IP-internal topic position is also the position involved in patterns where the object precedes both the finite auxiliary and the main verb.

This paper discusses Object Inversion in Icelandic syntax, i.e. examples where the direct object precedes the indirect object (DO-IO orders) in active clauses. In contrast to the neutral IO-DO order, Object Inversion is incredibly rare with most ditransitive verbs and more or less restricted to ditransitive verbs in the DAT-ACC class. This is shown by extensive searches in the new Risamálheild Corpus. These searches also show that Object Inversion strongly favors examples where the DO encodes old information and is phonologically lighter than the following IO. These results yield new and important insights into the study of Object Inversion but also confirm earlier claims in the literature.

The present paper discusses the aspectual class of ‘semelfactives’, which comprises expressions that introduce eventualities with inherent boundaries, often a very short duration, but no lexically defined change of state, e.g., ‘flash’ and ‘cough’. After reviewing previous analyses of semelfactives (including their integration into an overall system of aspectual classification), an analysis of semelfactives that treats them as denoting singleton (rather than iterated) eventualities will be defended. As a challenge for this analysis of semelfactives, semantic construction of semelfactives with frequency adverbials will be presented and analysed in terms of a coercion operator.

Copredication, especially when combined with quantification, provides interesting examples to support the idea that common nouns have their own identity criteria, as once argued for by Geach and subsequently studied by others. In this paper, revisiting the use of dot-types in modern type theories to model copredication, we show that, when both copredication and quantification are involved, CNs are not just types but should better be interpreted as types associated with their own identity criteria. In other words, formally, CNs are setoids – pairs whose first component is a type that interprets the domain of a CN and whose second component gives the identity criterion for that CN. For copredication with quantification, identity criteria play an essential role in giving a proper treatment of individuation and counting and hence constructing appropriate semantics to facilitate reasoning correctly. With CNs being setoids, the dot-type approach provides an adequate theory for copredication in general and for copredication with quantification in particular. It is further explained that the CNs-as-types approach is still the appropriate characterisation of our approach to interpreting CNs since, in phenomena that do not involve the interaction of copredication with quantification, the identity criteria of related CNs are essentially the same and can be safely ignored.

Self-paced reading and eye-tracking studies have generally found that combining aspectual verbs (like ‘begin’ and ‘finish’) with entity nouns (like ‘the book’ or ‘the coffee’) is associated with increased reading times on and around the noun (McElree et al. 2001; Traxler et al. 2002; Pickering et al. 2005). This processing cost is widely interpreted as evidence of complement coercion—aspectual verbs semantically select for an event (like ‘dancing’ or ‘the dance’) and can take entity objects only if they are coerced into an event through a computationally costly process of type-shifting (Pustejovsky 1995; Jackendoff 1997). This paper presents an eye-tracking study of the Canadian English ‘be done NP’ construction, e.g., ‘I am done/finished my homework’ (not to be confused with the dialect-neutral ‘I am done/finished WITH my homework’) to mean ‘I have finished my homework’. Results suggest a processing penalty for entity-denoting nouns like ‘the script’ (compared to event description nouns like ‘the audition’) in this construction, which supports Fruehwald & Myler’s (2015) proposal that ‘done’ and ‘finished’ in this construction are aspectual adjectives that behave like aspectual verbs in requiring complement coercion and type-shifting for entity-denoting nouns.

This paper presents an analysis of coercion and related phenomena in the framework of Dependent Type Semantics (DTS). Using underspecified terms in DTS, we present an analysis of selectional restriction as presupposition; we then combine it with a type called ‘transfer frame’ to provide an analysis of coercion. Our analysis focuses on the fact that coercion is triggered not only by type mismatch between predicates and their arguments, but also by more general inference with contextual information. We show how the analysis can be extended to copredication of logical polysemy and complement coercion. Finally, we will suggest that this analysis can shed light on an aspect of complicity that is invoked in interpreting coercion and other meaning-shifting phenomena.

The paper focuses on verbal idioms and their place in the lexicon. I discuss their morphosyntactic properties and effects observed for copredication. The data show that verbal idioms can be neither stored as atomic items, nor can their parts be treated as polysemous, i.e. as including “standard” and idiomatic meaning. I argue that a plausible result can be achieved by combining the framework of Distributed Morphology with Chomsky’s recent version of cyclic derivation. Viewed from that angle, idioms can be treated as emerging from derivational layers yielding a kind of structural coercion in the sense of Harley & Noyer (2000).

It has been observed that cross-linguistically the core posture verbs ‘sit’/‘stand/‘lie’ can extend their meaning beyond the literal sense encoding posture or spatial orientation (see Newman 2002 for an overview). In the cognitive literature, the conceptual background of these extensions has been discussed, but up to now, there has been no discussion of the non-literal senses in the theoretical linguistic literature, including how the different senses are disambiguated. This paper supplements the cognitive descriptions of posture verbs, presenting data from an independent corpus study and proposing a formal analysis. The in-depth investigation of one English posture verb, ‘sit’, yields an empirical generalization that contributes to the discussion surrounding non-literal meaning.

Culture is often transmitted in a text through lexemes termed realia words. These words are used to denominate culturally specific objects, but because they are culturally oriented they are very difficult to translate: various strategies are used by translators and are described in translation studies. This paper analyzes realia words used in the book Vaffelhjarte (Waffle Hearts) by the Norwegian children’s writer Maria Parr and translated into Italian. The study distinguishes different types of realia (personal names, place names, names of foods and drinks, names of holidays, and other names describing material culture) and the various strategies used to translate each type.

This study compares the political discourses of Silvio Berlusconi and Jens Stoltenberg. These two politicians represent different political ideologies and belong to two different countries—and, hence, to different cultures. However, both of them were in power for a long time and almost in the same historical period. What kinds of differences and similarities can be found in the language used in their discourses when talking to people? Three discourses produced by each politician under similar circumstances are analyzed. This paper focuses on the lexical items used in the discourses, describing them from a quantitative (frequency) and qualitative point of view. The differences in the use of metaphors is explained by affiliation to two different cultures, whereas the lexical choice is often based on linguistic and individual properties.

This paper explores the use of pronouns in student academic writing in L1 Norwegian and L2 English. Three aspects of pronoun use are examined: general pronoun frequency, pronoun reference, and the uses of ‘I’ and ‘we’. Students of English are typically advised to avoid being explicitly present in their academic texts (Lysvåg & Stenbrenden 2014), while students writing in Norwegian are often encouraged to use first-person pronouns. However, the results show that both sets of students use explicit self-reference in similar ways. Frequent uses of ‘I’ and ‘we’ are as conductors of research and as guides or navigators assisting the reader through the text.

Danish university students are often criticised for a general lack of proficiency in orthography, punctuation and grammar in the academic register. However, there has been limited empirical substantiation to support the claim. In this paper, we present the results of a study of linguistic deviations in university assignments written by first-year Journalism and Danish students at the University of Southern Denmark (N = 100 students). The results show that the majority of both groups struggles with Danish orthography and punctuation when writing academically, which seems to confirm some of the assertions made by the critics. However, it is argued that the inherent conflict of orthographic and punctuation principles in Danish as well as the specific characteristics and challenges of academic writing are more probable causes than the claimed general decline in the writing proficiency of students.

This paper describes the work and methods used to compile monolingual Norwegian and Swedish academic word lists as well as a merged Norwegian-Swedish list. The resulting list is discussed with respect to similarities and especially differences between the two languages, in terms of concepts such as cognates, false friends and remote friends.