This is the first issue of Volume 30 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 NAL. 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>. We are well aware that there have been problems with joining the NAL in the not so distant past, but we have reasons to hope that soon such problems will only be a distant memory.

The second issue of Volume 31 (December 2008) of the Nordic Journal of Linguistics will be a special issue devoted to the syntax of nominals and noun phrases, edited by Lars-Olof Delsing and Kersti Börjars.

This paper gives an account of the event and argument structure of past participles, and the linking between argument structure and valence structure. It further accounts for how participles form perfect and passive constructions with auxiliaries. We assume that the same participle form is used in both types of construction. Our claim is that the valence structure of a past participle is predictable from its semantic type, and that the valence structure predicts which auxiliary a past participle combines with in perfect constructions and whether the past participle may occur in passive constructions. Our approach sets itself apart from similar approaches, cf. e.g. Heinz & Matiasek (1994), Kathol (1994), Pollard (1994) and Müller (2003), with its strong emphasis on semantics.

Deverbal nouns are often referred to as hybrids, containing both verbal and nominal features. In many languages deverbal nouns tend to develop into what Vendler (1967) called perfect nouns. Various stages of this development in Norwegian are proposed, drawing on Grammaticalization Theory and Lexicalization Theory. Frequency data are provided from a large newspaper corpus. The deverbal nouns are analyzed as going through a process of lexicalization where reduction in compositionality, reduced token frequency and increased idiosyncrasy are central elements. This process is triggered by relevance to the root, language use, isomorphism and the maximal difference principle. The article shows that Norwegian deverbal nouns are in a state of flux and that even different members of the same morphological type may behave quite differently syntactically and semantically.

This article presents a typed feature structure grammar formalism for Mainland Scandinavian which outperforms existing grammars in several respects: it is multilingual and captures dialectal variation and many typological facts, and it is computationally efficient. Our reference point is the grammar formalism of Underwood (1997). It is proven that Underwood's formalism is intractable. Our formalism improves on this result, i.e. it is decidable in polynomial time. The article covers the phenomena covered in Underwood (1997) and non-local dependencies.