This is the first issue of volume 33 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://journals.cambridge.org/NJL>, as well as on the NAL web site, <http://cc.joensuu.fi/linguistics/nal>.

All modern linguistic science – all theoretical frameworks and approaches – at one point or another becomes linguistic typology. Sooner or later they ask the fundamental typological questions: What are the universal features of human language? How do we explain their universality? And how do we explain those features of human language which are not universal, but which vary from language to language? How do variation and universality relate to each other? The methodology of linguistic typology – to approach these questions by mapping and comparing language data globally – is not necessarily shared by all linguists, but the basic questions remain the same.

It is well-known that grammatical movement is somehow linked to functional heads. There is less agreement on the excact nature of this correlation. According to one view, phrases are moved to the specifier positions of functional heads because functional heads attract them. According to another view, movement is not triggered by functional heads alone, but depends on the larger grammatical context. For instance, one such proposal says that T (tense) becomes attractive only when selected by finite C (complementizer), while V becomes attractive when selected by v* (transitivizer). What attracts phrases are therefore the C–T system and the v*–V system as a whole, not the individual functional heads; moved phrases are then sandwitched between the two heads. In this article, we present evidence in favor of this view by looking at first language acquisition. The data shows that in child Finnish, subject determiner phrases (DPs) move into the position of grammatical subject if and only if the full complementizer system has matured. Movement to the (Spec, TP) subject position therefore depends on the presence of C.

Two production studies and one perception study were designed to systematically test F0 alignment and segment duration in Icelandic pitch accents with a view to investigating previous claims about the inventory of distinct intonational categories. Four different conditions were tested: (i) prenuclear pitch accents, (ii) nuclear accents in sentence-final position in sentences with either broad focus or (iii) with final narrow focus, and (iv) nuclear narrow focus accents in non-final position. The alignment results are such that (i) prenuclear accents are signalled by a late rise (L*H), while final nuclear accents are signalled by an early rise; (ii) F0 peaks in prefinal nuclear accents are aligned earlier than in prenuclear accents, but later than in final nuclear accents, suggesting a prosodic boundary effect. The duration measurements suggest a positional, but no focus, effect on the duration of the accented syllable and its vowel, such that syllables/vowels earlier in the sentence are longer than later ones.

This short communication is concerned with long object shift of reflexives in Swedish. Only 3rd person reflexives can shift across their antecedent. For some reason this is possible even if the antecedent is 1st or 2nd person as well, but certain requirements on the antecedent are necessary. This paper shows that neither a purely syntactic nor a purely semantic analysis can account for all the facts. Instead the best analysis seems to be one that makes use of Bonet's (1995) post-syntactic morphological processes: feature delinking, feature erasure and feature insertion.

This short communication is a brief extension of recent work on verb second (V2) in Scandinavian declarative clauses and a contribution to research on the relation between V2 and illocutionary force. It is argued that Swedish data present a problem for the hypothesis that a bi-conditional relation holds between the illocutionary force of an assertion and V2 word order. The relevant force, to the extent that we can identify it, appears to be available also in the absence of V2 word order. It is tentatively suggested that V2 encodes evidentiality.