This article investigates the meaning and use of singular indefinite determiners in Swedish, in particular the way in which the existential determiner någon/något contrasts with the indefinite article en/ett in different contexts. The problem is approached from three different perspectives, the first being a contrastive Scandinavian perspective, where the Swedish data are reviewed in the light of contrastive data from the closely related languages Danish and Norwegian. Secondly, corpus data are used to substantiate the results of the contrastive analysis both quantitatively and qualitatively. The last section adopts a more theoretical perspective and tries to present a formal semantic analysis of the two determiners under study, drawing on typological work on indefinites and studies of the historical development of indefinite determiners.

The article presents the Norwegian majority official standard language “Bokmål” – its history, its present status and especially its present development – both to readers who are acquainted with the subject and to readers who are not. Some controversial aspects of Bokmål are discussed, such as its different varieties, its delimitation, especially with respect to the private standard “Riksmål”, its origin and the question of to what extent there is a spoken Bokmål. In connection with the delimitation of Bokmål, the article introduces the distinction between “prescribed” and “factual” norms – and the norm concept itself – and argues for the necessity of distinguishing clearly between the prescribed and the factual Bokmål. The last part of the article is devoted to the present development of Bokmål, both as it is regulated and as it is practised. The latest official reforms which have been proposed are reviewed and discussed. The language policy of the main newspapers are reviewed, as is the use of Bokmål, in the press as well as in the literature.

The purpose of this paper is twofold. On the one hand, I want to show that, contrary to what is sometimes claimed in the literature, NP-adjuncts of the kind tomorrow, last week, etc., are attested sentence-medially in English. This pattern would seem to be particularly frequent in journalistic prose. Second, I examine and refute an analysis which takes such sentence-medial NP-adjuncts to be analysed as IP-external adjuncts across which the subject has been topicalised or focalised. Though such an analysis would be in keeping with the often proposed view that NP-adjuncts do not occupy an IP-internal position, I show that it raises a host of empirical problems and that it is not tenable. The conclusion is that NP-adjuncts cannot be analysed as being IP-external and that they occupy a high IP-internal position.