This is the first issue of volume 38 of the Nordic Journal of Linguistics. NJL is the journal of the Nordic Association of Linguists. Individuals may subscribe to the Journal by joining the Nordic Association of Linguists. The NAL membership form can be found on the Cambridge University Press web site of NJL, http://journals.cambridge.org/NJL, as well as on the NAL web site, http://www.uef.fi/nal.

The initiative for this special issue on prosody in the Nordic languages developed in connection with an international symposium on prosody which took place in Lund on 2–3 June 2014 (http://konferens.ht.lu.se/en/bruce-2014/). The symposium commemorated the life and work of Gösta Bruce (1947–2010), our friend, teacher, mentor, and colleague during many years. Gösta's contributions to the field of prosody have been of utmost significance to the development of prosody research, in particular his work on modelling the structure and function of Swedish word accents ‘in sentence perspective’.

There are conflicting reports in the literature concerning whether the Scandinavian languages use prepositional passives as in English. Maling & Zaenen (1985) showed that Icelandic does not have the construction; instead the Icelandic data should be analyzed as topicalization of the complement of a preposition in impersonal passives. They suggested that the same account would be appropriate for Danish and Swedish, whereas Norwegian is reported to have a rather productive prepositional passive (Lødrup 1991). In order to find out to what extent and in what ways prepositional passives are actually used, we carried out a series of investigations in Danish, Norwegian and Swedish contemporary text corpora, analyzing over 3600 potential prepositional passives, with a balance of periphrastic and morphological passive forms. We have found that prepositional passives are indeed used in all three languages, but rather infrequently, ranging from 3.4 per million words (3.4/mw) in Swedish, 5/mw in Danish to 16/mw in Norwegian. The majority of the prepositional passives are periphrastic bli(ve)-passives. The passive subject is typically animate, a person or an animal, who is psychologically affected by the action, or the lack of action, expressed by the participle. The notion of affectedness that is relevant for these languages thus differs from what has been described for English. Prepositional s-passives are found in coordinated structures and in infinitival complements of modal verbs, a context known to favour s-passive.

Taking a self-determination perspective, the present study aims at assessing how the linguistic background shapes internal and external motivation towards Finnish among young Swedish-speaking Finns. Self-report questionnaire data were collected in 2014 among students in Swedish language secondary schools in Esbo/Espoo and Raseborg/Raasepori in Finland (N = 233). The results demonstrated that bilinguals are more internally motivated towards Finnish, whereas Swedish speakers are more externally motivated towards Finnish. Furthermore, while Swedish speakers in both Swedish-dominated and Finnish-dominated localities reported the same level of external motivation, bilinguals in the Swedish-dominated locality reported higher level of external motivation than did bilinguals in the Finnish-dominated locality. These findings and their theoretical implications are discussed.

The second issue of Volume 39 (autumn 2016) of the Nordic Journal of Linguistics will be a special issue devoted to discourse, grammar and intersubjectivity. This issue will be edited by Marja Etelämäki, Ilona Herlin, Tapani Möttönen and Laura Visapää.

We give an overview of the phonological properties and processes that define the categories of the prosodic hierarchy in Swedish: the prosodic word (ω), the prosodic phrase (φ) and the intonation phrase (ι). The separation of two types of tonal prominence, big accents versus small accents (previously called focal and word accent, e.g. Bruce 1977, 2007), is crucial for our analysis. The ω in Swedish needs to be structured on two levels, which we refer to as the minimal ω and the maximal ω, respectively. The minimal ω contains one stress, whereas the maximal ω contains one accent. We argue for a separate category φ that governs the distribution of big accents within clauses. The ι governs the distribution of clause-related edge phenomena like the initiality accent and right-edge boundary tones as well as the distribution of nuclear big accents.

The brain response to words with correct and incorrect word accent–suffix combinations in South Swedish was investigated using electroencephalography (EEG). Accent 1 yielded an increased brain response (‘preactivation negativity’) that has previously been interpreted as reflecting preactivation of suffixes. Preactivation is greater for accent 1 due to its association with a limited set of suffixes, whereas accent 2 is default for compound words. The tonal realization of the word accent opposition in South Swedish is practically the mirror image of that in Central Swedish, where a similar preactivation negativity has been found. Therefore, the brain response is unlikely to result from a difference in acoustic features between the word accents. Invalidly cued suffixes yielded brain response pattern showing increased processing load of the unexpected suffix (negative electric potential) followed by its reprocessing (positivity ‘P600’).

The Danish stød, a kind of glottal prosody associated with certain syllables, as in barʔn ‘child’ (cf. stødless barnlig ‘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 the perfect 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.

At present, there is no comprehensive psycholinguistic database containing Swedish words with ratings of word properties such as e.g. imageability, although researchers carrying out psycholinguistic studies in Swedish face the need to be able to control for and systematically vary such properties. The present study addressed this issue by investigating the possibility of transferring English word ratings to Swedish. Imageability, familiarity and age of acquisition (AoA) ratings were obtained for a sample of Swedish words (N = 99). These ratings were then compared with the corresponding English ratings from the Medical Research Council (MRC) Psycholinguistic Database (Coltheart 1981) using Spearman correlation. Swedish and English word ratings were found to be highly correlated for imageability and AoA, and moderately correlated for familiarity. Following these results, we suggest that, in general, ratings of these variables can be reliably transferred between the two languages, although some caution should be taken, since for some individual words, some ratings might differ substantially for their Swedish and English translations.

This paper concerns crosslinguistic differences in the acceptability of so-called relative clause extraction constructions, exemplified by the unacceptable English sentence *This boat I know the guy that owns (associated with the acceptable canonical sentence I know the guy that owns this boat). It has sometimes been argued, since Ross (1967), that such extractions are universally blocked by a syntactic constraint. However, following observations of such structures in English and other languages, some linguists have argued that such sentences have varying degrees of acceptability and that the degree of acceptability depends on attention limits and pragmatic foregroundedness/backgroundedness. Another view which appears to have gained ground in recent years is one where the degree of acceptability is directly related to processing difficulty. The analysis presented in this paper is based on a comparison between English and Swedish, and includes authentic data, examples previously discussed in the literature, as well as acceptability-tested invented sentences. In the end it will be argued that, while the dominance- and processing-based proposals are on the right track, there is a more plausible and straightforward way of explaining the observed crosslinguistic variation using the theoretical framework of Construction Grammar. Thus, an alternative account will be presented drawing on general principles which are well established within cognitive- and construction-based theories.

The Danish prosodic phenomenon stød is associated with a specific range of suffixes including the singular definite suffixes -en and -et. Diachronically, as well as distributionally, stød is related to Swedish/Norwegian accent 1, but unlike accent 1, stød is seen as phonetically and phonologically marked. Keeping in mind the cross-distribution between phonetic/phonological markedness and distributional patterns, we investigate here whether stød is also related to accent 1 when it comes to cognitive markedness. We present the results of a psycholinguistic study in which participants attended to words that were either appropriate combinations of prosody (stød vs. non-stød) and suffix (singular definite -en/-et vs. plural indefinite -e) or mismatches between prosody and suffix. Participants gave slower and more inaccurate responses to mismatches. This effect of mismatch was most pronounced for words with non-stød stems, indicating that the cognitive markedness status of stød corresponds to that of accent 2.

This squib provides counterexamples to the claim that Icelandic reflexive sig cannot be construed logophorically if immediately contained inside an infinitival clause. Consequences for Eric Reuland's views on the division of labor between grammar and pragmatics are discussed.

It has been shown in the literature that cross-linguistically, the other-initiated repair element ‘huh’ is typically realised with rising intonation. Icelandic has exceptional status in this respect in that it has falling intonation with Ha [haː] ‘huh’. The literature claims that it is language-specific interrogative prosody that accounts for this exceptional status of Icelandic. More specifically, it argues that falling intonation is the default for questions in Icelandic and that the other-initiated repair interjection shares its intonational features with interrogatives. The aim of this paper is twofold. First, using map-task data, it confirms previous results for the intonation of Icelandic Ha, and in addition shows that its more complex relative Hvað segirðu/Hvað sagðirðu ‘What do/did you say?’ is realised with falling intonation as well. Both expressions are realised with an H* pitch accent followed by downward pitch movement to L%. Secondly, the paper argues, for a number of reasons, against the assumption that question prosody is enough to account for the Icelandic pattern, and it suggests instead that Ha and Hvað segirðu/Hvað sagðirðu are in fact not specifically marked in intonation, but are realised with a combination of pitch accent and boundary tone found across utterance types in Icelandic.

On the basis of data from Swedish, this paper examines the Small Clause Hypothesis (Kush & Lindahl 2011, Kush, Omaki & Hornstein 2013) proposed to account for relative clause (RC) extractions in Mainland Scandinavian. The hypothesis predicts that extraction possibilities differ for relative clauses in the complement of verbs which select and verbs which do not select a small clause (SC), and that the possibility of RC extraction hinges on the ability of the matrix verb to select SCs involving the predicational operator som. I report results from an acceptability judgment experiment on RC extraction in Swedish manipulating three conditions: (a) SC-selecting verbs compatible with som, (b) SC-selecting verbs incompatible with som, and (c) verbs that are incompatible with SCs. The results show no significant difference between these conditions, thus offer no support in favor of the Small Clause Hypothesis. Additional problems are posed by the possibility of extraction from object RCs and by extraction possibilities in the absence of som.

This article compares three accounts of Finnish intonation using a perception experiment with manipulated f0 contours. The experiment involved compound/noun phrase minimal pairs differing in f0 pattern. To address the question of tonal specification, manipulations changed f0 contours of recorded compound words, associating them with f0 patterns having different components of the naturally occurring f0 rise-fall contour. Thus, the study investigated which tonal targets were crucial for the perception of a complete tonal contour inducing a noun phrase interpretation. Results suggested that the falling part of the rise-falls, modelled as realisations of a high and a following low target, was essential. They furthermore revealed evidence for these targets being associated with prosodic phrases, as well as for Finnish tonal targets being characterised by a flexibility that contrasts with accent realisations in languages like English.

This paper provides evidence for the idea that relaxed verb-second (V2) languages exist and exhibt specific properties which distinguish them from both strict V2 and non-V2 languages. The identification of the relaxed subtype of V2 languages implies that V2 should not be understood as a linear restriction, but as an abstract rule involving the movement of the finite verb to a head of the left periphery in all main clauses.

In Norway, there are between 10 and 15 bilingual or multilingual native speakers of Norwegian and Esperanto. This paper discusses some prosodic traits in the Esperanto spoken by one of them. The focus will be on compound stress. The speaker assigns primary stress to the penultimate syllable of words as in Standard Esperanto, including most compounds. Some of the Esperanto compounds, however, display first element primary stress, as in the Norwegian adstrate. In the current dataset, this is especially so for underived nouns. It is proposed that the Norwegian-like pattern is found in compound nouns that are formed spontaneously, while the Standard Esperanto pattern is found in lexicalised compounds, understood as prosodically simplex. For derived compounds in word classes other than nouns, the overall stress pattern is more like that of Standard Esperanto.