Investigations of linguistic variation are interesting and important both from the point of view of theoretical linguistics and from that of social and cultural studies. This special issue of the Nordic Journal of Linguistics focuses on linguistic diversity from a theoretical perspective and presents five selected papers that combine the study of dialect data with linguistic theorizing.

This is the first issue of volume 28 of the Nordic Journal of Linguistics. The NJL is the journal of the Nordic Association of Linguists. Individuals may subscribe to the Nordic Journal of Linguistics by joining the Nordic Association of Linguists. The NAL membership form can be found on the Cambridge University Press web site of the NJL, <http://uk.cambridge.org/journals/njl/>, as well as on the NAL web site, <http://cc.joensuu.fi/linguistics/nal>.

Northern Norwegian (NN) allows verbs to precede adverbs in non-V2 contexts, whereas in Standard Norwegian (StN) verbs have to follow adverbs. These facts are discussed with respect to three different approaches to clausal structure. NN is problematic for a head movement account (cf. Cinque 1999) because multiple verbs may precede a given adverb, leading to violations of the Head Movement Constraint. A multiple positions account (cf. Ernst 2002, Svenonius 2002) would assume that any adverb in StN and NN can be adjoined to high positions, which may be problematic with respect to scope relations. A remnant movement approach (cf. Nilsen 2003) can account for both StN and much of the NN data by means of one generalisation, but a separate generalisation is needed for finite verbs in NN. Thus, all three approaches are faced with challenges with respect to the Norwegian data. However, it is argued that the remnant movement approach seems the most promising of the three approaches.

The second issue of Volume 29 (2006) of the Nordic Journal of Linguistics will be a special issue on grammaticalization.

Comparison of languages and linguistic data is essential if progress in our understanding of the nature of spoken languages is to be made. We understand phenomena better through comparison and contrast. This paper discusses problems that arise in trying to transfer a spoken language corpus transcribed and formatted according to one standard into the standard and format of another corpus. The problems that arise are related both to the differences that exist between the standards of the corpora and to human errors leading to lack of reliability in creating the transcriptions. Although the discussion is based on transfer and transliteration between two specific corpora (the Danish BySoc, BySociolingvistisk Korpus, and the Swedish GSLC, Göteborg Spoken Language Corpus), we believe that the discussion in the article documents and highlights problems of a general kind which have to be faced whenever spoken language corpora of different formats are to be compared.

The languages of the Northwest Saamic group evince a pattern of syllabification that maximises the complexity of the coda in a bimoraic stressed syllable (cf. Kiparsky 2004 on Fenno-Swedish). The coda maximisation requirement interacts with four other syllabic well-formedness constraints in a fixed ranking that regulates the sonority profile, quantity and structural complexity of the rhyme. Varying the point at which the coda maximisation requirement interleaves with the constraints in this fixed ranking generates a restrictive microtypology of coda maximisation in Northwest Saamic. The last part of the paper proposes to eliminate the stipulative fixed ordering by ranking the four syllabic well-formedness constraints in a proper inclusion (stringency) hierarchy (de Lacy 2004). It is argued that syllable rhymes may be characterised as falling on a scale of degree of perceptual integrity (dpi) and that complex codas are more dispreferred when the syllable has low dpi.

The aim of the present study is twofold. First, it addresses the question of how well Norwegians are able to identify Norwegian dialects. Second, it investigates the role which intonation plays in the identification of Norwegian dialects. In a number of listening experiments, 15 groups of young Norwegians from different parts of Norway were asked to identify 15 different dialects. The dialects were presented in the original form as well as in a version that was manipulated by computer in such a way that the intonation was removed. In this way it was possible to see how important intonation is for the identification of the dialects. The results are put into perspective by comparing them to results of similar experiments with Dutch dialects. Norwegians turned out to be less good at recognizing Norwegian dialects than Dutchmen. Linguistic and extra-linguistic explanations are given. Furthermore the results show that intonation is more important for the identification of Norwegian dialects than for the identification of Dutch dialects.

The Insular Scandinavian (IS) languages, Icelandic and Faroese, exhibit variation in subject case marking, primarily pertaining to an older idiosyncratic case and an innovative case that instantiates a regular pattern. This variation occurs to a considerable degree at the level of the individual speaker. We argue that this intra-speaker variation in IS involves optionality within one grammar and not competition between two different grammars or dialects in the sense of Kroch (1989, 1994). Mainly on the basis of data from the so-called Dative Substitution (DS) in Icelandic, we show that this variation does not involve any kind of parameter, and that it is not the result of dialect contact, as the grammar competition analysis would entail.

In this article we try to determine the diachronic origin of a few sentential particles attested in some North-Eastern Italian dialects on the basis of their syntactic properties. The particles we consider are associated with specific clause types and can only appear in matrix non-declarative clauses; they generally occur in sentence-final position, and only some of them can follow the wh-item in an interrogative clause. They display the typical properties of X°-elements, and can therefore be analysed as functional heads of the CP layer; we present an analysis exploiting movement of the wh-item or of the whole clause to the specifier corresponding to the head occupied by the particle. The different distribution that characterizes the two main types of particles seems to depend on whether they derive etymologically from pronouns or from adverbs; the new properties developed in the grammaticalization process suggest that when an element is reanalysed as a functional category, it can further acquire the value of functional projections merged close to it in the structure.

Accent 1 is very much accepted in the literature as the default tonal marker in Scandinavian languages. Consequently, stems and affixes are almost always specified for accent 2. Only rarely in some analyses is accent 1 specified for affixes, but never for stems. We believe that under these conditions, the resulting morphology/phonology interaction is rather complex, having to include special rules of accent marking, floating tones, deaccenting together with inexplicable exceptions. In our analysis of the tonal systems of Swedish and Norwegian, accent 1 is the lexically specified accent and accent 2 is postlexically assigned. Words and affixes may be lexically specified for accent 1, which inevitably dominates. Consequently, if a morphologically complex word includes a lexically specified affix or stem, the entire word will bear accent 1, giving us patterns of alternations like beskriva1, skriva2. This analysis enables us to account for all the facts almost exceptionlessly, with no special tonal rules, constraints or templates.

This paper explores different syntactic variations and functional properties of clausal units that are initiated by the finite verb in Swedish. We focus on V1 constructions that are basically declarative in function, thus excluding interrogative, conditional and directive uses. Because V1 constructions, and particularly certain variants of them, are typical of spoken Swedish, our examples and analyses focus primarily on the usage in speaking. The V1 constructions studied include whole-utterance constructions in conversational sequences, utterance-internal extensions, and utterance-internal reshapings, such as syntactic blends. We will offer an analysis of (declarative) V1 constructions, which in some respects differs from analyses proposed by generative syntacticians or traditional grammarians. Our analysis of the constructional resource is discourse oriented. In this perspective, V1 constructions are analyzable as sequentially dependent, second, or ‘subsequent’ moves, viz. units that can scarcely initiate a communicative project but which instead continue, extend or comment on an already initiated project. Thus, rather than analyzing V1 constructions as one type of ellipsis they could be seen as full-fledged clausal units whose existence is conditioned by their position in a discourse or utterance context. From a theoretical perspective, this paper is a contribution to an emerging dialogical or interactional model of (Swedish) grammar.

Based on a corpus of spontaneous production data, this paper compares the word order of wh-questions in two Norwegian dialects, Kåfjord and Tromsø. While the choice of word order (V2 or non-V2) in Tromsø is dependent on information structure, the Kåfjord speakers produce considerably more non-V2 in questions with monosyllabic wh-elements. The majority of questions with multisyllabic wh-constituents, on the other hand, occurs with V2. This synchronic variation is given a diachronic analysis within a Split-CP model of clause structure and a cue-based approach to acquisition and change, where an economy principle (head preference) also plays an important role. Furthermore, an information structure drift from V2 to non-V2 is argued to cause the cue for verb movement to fall below a critical level in the input to children, the result being that V2 only survives in lexically marked cases in Kåfjord, i.e. with the verb ‘be’.