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.

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 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 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.

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’.