Introduction

Extract

This special issue of the Nordic Journal of Linguistics is devoted to Comparative Nordic Semantics. Whereas much research has been carried out on comparative syntax, morphology and phonology in the Nordic languages, much less work has been done on the comparative semantics of these languages. But the fact that some of the Nordic languages, namely the Scandinavian ones, Danish, Faroese, Icelandic, Norwegian and Swedish, are historically, lexically and structurally very similar means that they provide an interesting target for semantic research. Are there systematic semantic differences between these languages? If so, are the formal semantic analytic tools that have been developed mainly for English and German sufficiently fine-grained to account for the differences among the Scandinavian languages? These were some of the questions asked in the research project Comparative Semantics for Nordic Languages (NORDSEM), which was funded by the Joint Committee of the Nordic Research Councils for the Humanities in 1998–2001 and which involved researchers at the Copenhagen Business School, Göteborg University and the University of Oslo. Two of the papers in this issue (by Carl Vikner and Kjell Johan Sæbø) derive directly from the NORDSEM project whereas the third paper, by Erich Round, pursues some issues investigated during the project by Joakim Nivre and published in Nordic Journal of Linguistics 25:1 (2002).