This special issue on Language Change of the Nordic Journal of Linguistics contains five articles relating to the topic in different ways, clustering around three main themes: (de)grammaticalization, word order and stress systems.

It has been argued that the development of the Swedish possessive -s constitutes an example of degrammaticalisation because it has changed from being an affix to being a clitic (Norde 1997; 2001a, b). I argue that a simple distinction between affix and clitic cannot capture the development of this element, instead a distinction in two dimensions need to be made; PLACEMENT needs to be distinguished from DEGREE OF ATTACHMENT. Furthermore, I claim that the distinction between agreement and once only marking represents yet another dimension. With respect to the Swedish possessive, as Norde (1997) shows, there has been a clear change from agreement to once only marking; however, I argue that this change does not tell us anything about the element's morphological status. With respect to placement, -s is still subject to competing constraints and with respect to attachment, there is some evidence of morphological interaction between the -s and the word to which it attaches. It is then inappropriate to call the Swedish possessive -s a clitic and to refer to the change which it has undergone as degrammaticalisation.

The present paper deals with the construction ta og/och V ‘take and V’ in the Nordic languages. After a brief overview of pseudocoordinations of the type ‘V1 and V2’, the use and meaning of the ta-construction is discussed, with special emphasis on Modern Norwegian. It is argued that the subject of the activity expressed by V2 must normally have an agentive role, and that the construction has an intentional and initiating meaning. After having established the meaning of the modern construction, the historical development of the construction is discussed. On the basis of Old Norse examples, it is argued that the ta-construction has developed out of paratactically combined sentences where ta has been desemanticized, and has come to function as a kind of auxiliary. However, this development must, at least partly, have taken place at a very early stage. A hypothesis that the ta-construction has been borrowed from Greek is rejected.

This paper focuses on the origin of the V2 property in the history of Germanic. Considering data from Gothic and Old English (OE), it is suggested that the historical core of the V2 phenomenon reduces to V-to-C movement that is triggered in operator contexts. Therefore, the historical system shares basic properties with limited V2 in Modern English. It is shown that apparent deviations from this pattern that can be observed in Gothic can be attributed to the influence of Greek word order. Concerning the apparently more elaborate V2 properties of OE, it is claimed that a large part of them in fact do not involve a Spec-head relation, but rather result from linear adjacency between the clause-initial element and a finite verb located in T0. Special attention is paid to the placement of pronominal subjects in OE, which are claimed to occupy SpecTP. This contrasts with a lower position of full subjects due to the absence of an EPP in OE. Finally, the loss of superficial V2 orders in the Middle English period is attributed to the development of an EPP feature in T.

This article attempts to shed light on the issue of a possible link between the loss of ‘rich’ subject-verb agreement and the loss of verb raising in embedded clauses in earlier stages of the Mainland Scandinavian languages. Different versions of this so-called ‘Rich Agreement Hypothesis’ are compared in light of new diachronic data from the history of Danish. Examples of word order variation with and without verb raising over sentential adverbials were collected from a corpus of twelve sets of texts written in the Early Modern Danish period (ca. 1500–1700). Empirical results indicate that distinctions in person agreement in the verbal inflectional paradigm disappeared nearly 250 years before a significant decline in the frequency of verb raising. In order to explain a possible trigger for this change, the article closely examines the impact of structurally ambiguous word order and syntactic – not morphological – clues during acquisition.

A shift from left to right word-edge main stress can be observed in a large number of languages. Three cases, Icelandic/Faroese, Polish and Latin are studied in this paper. In doing so, two descriptive rule-based models are compared in order to evaluate their descriptive and explicative adequacy. The causes that have been proposed for the observed changes are critically discussed. Finally, an OT-description of the case studies is provided.