Jan Terje Faarlund: The Syntax of Mainland Scandinavian

With the publication of this book, Jan Terje Faarlund, professor emeritus of Scandinavian Linguistics at the University of Oslo, makes a comparative overview of Danish, Norwegian and Swedish available to linguists who are unable to read these languages. I believe this is the first book of its kind. To find a similar attempt we have to go back to the 1940s when Lage Hulthén published his comprehensive comparison of the syntax of Nordic languages, see Hulthén (1944, 1947). Hulthén’s study is however written in Swedish and is based on written sources mainly from the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th. The main sources for Faarlund’s book are the three reference grammars published in Norwegian, Swedish and Danish between 1997 and 2011: Norsk referansegrammatikk (Faarlund, Lie & Vannebo, 1997, abbreviated NRG), Svenska Akademiens grammatik (Teleman, Hellberg & Andersson 1999, abbreviated SAG) and Grammatik over det Danske Sprog (Hansen & Heltoft 2011, abbreviated GDS). These grammars are accessible to linguists who speak any one of the described languages, whereas the primary intended readership for Faarlund’s new book is presumably the linguistic community outside Scandinavia. This is also the reason why this review is written in English

The Syntax and Semantics of Questions in Swedish

This dissertation provides an explicit syntactic and semantic account for a reasonably large sample of question constructions in Swedish. Within generative grammar, the existence of non-local dependencies as in constituent questions has been taken as evidence for the need to postulate transformational rules in the grammar of natural languages. Recently a number of linguists have proposed ways of handling such dependencies without transformations. Until now, these proposals have been based on English. In this study, we investigate the possibility of extending non-transformational approaches to languages like Swedish where question formation differs from English in a significant way. In Swedish, more than one constituent can be extracted from a clause. We discuss the consequences of this fact for transformational and non-transformational approaches to Swedish. It is shown that the non-transformational approaches need to be substantially modified in order to provide a syntactically and semantically adequate grammar for Swedish. The implications of these modifications are assessed from the point of view of choosing between grammars. The main part of the dissertation consists of an analysis of the semantics of constituent questions. We propose an extension to the semantics for questions in the framework of Montague grammar given by Hamblin and Karttunen. Most current approaches to questions take the entire question phrase to be the interrogative quantifier. We point out that these approaches are not adequate for questions where the interrogative phrase contains an anaphor bound from inside the sentence. In addition, these approaches cannot account for all readings of temporally ambiguous sentences. To allow the semantic rules to handle such cases as well, a more general approach to questions is proposed. On this approach, only the \u27which\u27 part of the question phrase constitutes the interrogative quantifier. This quantifier ranges not over individuals directly, as in the previous theories, but over functions that pick out sets of individuals. In simple questions, the result of the proposed analysis is tantamount to the results on earlier approaches. However, it is shown that only the proposed approach can generalize to more complex questions. The analysis proposed here is compared to current approaches to questions within transformational grammar. Finally, we discuss the relative merits of a structurally based and a semantically based approach to anaphoric relations

Absolut superlativ i samtida språkbruk

In this article we report on a corpus study of elative superlatives in contemporary Swedish. Elative superlatives differ from ordinary superlatives in that no direct comparison with other referents is involved. Instead a referent is said to have the property expressed by the adjective to a very high degree. In Swedish, elative superlatives are formally distinct from ordinary superlatives (they lack the post-nominal clitic article) which means that they can be found in corpus searches. We show that elative superlatives have expressive function and are typically used in emphatic assertions which are intended to make the strongest possible claim in a given situation. Elative superlatives are used in all grammatical functions but with slightly different implicational properties. Contrary to what has been assumed, elative superlatives are not limited to fixed expressions and formal written language. Creative uses abound in blog texts and sports commentaries.http://eecoppock.info/Engdahl+Coppock.pdfhttp://eecoppock.info/Engdahl+Coppock.pdfhttp://eecoppock.info/Engdahl+Coppock.pdfPublished versio

SUBJECT AND OBJECT POSITIONS IN SWEDISH

The issue of how to analyse so-called verb second languages has received a lot of attention in the recent theoretical literature. In most approaches, the analysis relies heavily on structure for the explanation of the word order phenomena. Starting with den Besten (1983), the finite verb is assumed to head a functional projection, whose specifier position provides the landing site for th