This article reports on a syntactic acceptability judgement study of 59 adult L2/Ln learners of Norwegian and a group of native controls, studying subject and object shift. These constructions involve movement of (mainly) pronominal subjects or objects across negation/adverbs. Both subject shift and object shift display considerable micro-variation in terms of syntax and information structure, dependent on factors such as nominal type (pronoun vs. full DP), function (subject vs. object), and information status (given vs. new/focused). Previous studies have shown that Norwegian children have an early preference for the unshifted position in both constructions, but that they acquire subject shift relatively early (before age 3). Object shift, on the other hand, is typically not in place until after age 6–7. Importantly, children are conservative learners, and never shift elements that should not move in the adult language. The results of the current study show that L2/Ln learners do not make all the fine distinctions that children make, in that they have a clear preference for all subjects in shifted position and all objects in unshifted position, although some distinctions fall into place with increased proficiency. Importantly, unlike children, the L2/Ln learners are not conservative learners; rather, they over-accept syntactic movement in several cases. The equivalent to this in language production would be to apply syntactic movement where it is not attested in the target language, which would be the opposite behaviour to that observed in L1 children.

The second issue of Volume 42 (autumn 2019) of the Nordic Journal of Linguistics will be a special issue devoted to diachronic syntax within the framework of generative grammar. The issue will be edited by David Håkansson, Erik Magnusson Petzell and Elisabet Engdahl.

This special issue of Nordic Journal of Linguistics is dedicated to the emerging field of forensic linguistics. There are competing definitions and delimitations of this term but here we will use it to refer to the investigation and elucidation of language evidence in a legal context. This includes the scrutiny of language data from different stages of the legal process, ranging from emergency calls to police interviews and courtroom interaction, as well as expert assessment and witness testimony in cases where the meaning or authorship of texts or utterances are questioned. While the analysis of authentic case data is often preferred or even required, access to such highly sensitive data types is naturally restricted by legal and ethical boundaries. An increasing amount of studies therefore employ experimental designs to test hypotheses and improve methodologies.

Earlier research states that if an unaccented pronoun refers to the subject of the preceding sentence, a focally accented pronoun will refer to the object. In the current study, we tested whether Norwegian adults select the intended pronoun referent in this context. Our study is also the first one to use eye-tracking to investigate children's developing sensitivity to intonational cues in pronoun resolution, and consequently the first one where Norwegian is the object language. The participants were monolingual 3-, 5-, and 7-year-old children, and a group of adults. They listened to the Norwegian version of utterances like ‘Sarai hugged Mariaj. Then shei/SHEj hugged her own teddy bear’, while watching two corresponding figures on a screen. This was followed by the question, in Norwegian, ‘Who hugged her own teddybear?’ When answering the question, the adults selected the subject referent (Sara) after unaccented pronouns, and the object referent (Maria) after focally accented pronouns. Eye-tracking data revealed that the 7-year-olds initially looked towards the object referent after hearing the pronoun, and then switched to look at the subject referent, regardless of the pronoun's intonation. The 5-year-olds answered the question by selecting the intended referent more often after a focally accented pronoun than after an unaccented one. Finally, the 3-year-olds showed no clear preferences. These results suggest that Norwegian children under the age of seven are still not adult-like when resolving accented and unaccented pronouns.

The aim of this study is to investigate how modifications of reporting verbs, modality, style and use of quotation marks in an authentic police report can lead to different interpretations by two groups of trainee police officers. Data was collected through an experiment in a classroom setting, where police trainees discussed two versions of the same police report in focus group discussions. The trainees’ statements were categorised into three themes: impression of the victim, impression of the accused, and assessment of the situation's severity. The results show that modifications such as formal or informal choice of words and the use of scare quotes proved to be influential linguistic modifications. In contrast, variation of reporting verbs and modality appeared less significant. The two versions of the text created different impressions of both the victim and the accused, and the interpretations of the severity of the situation depicted in the text varied between the two trainee groups. This highlights the importance of further study of the linguistic constructions of victims and perpetrators in police texts, in order to ensure credibility and equality before the law.

English outweighs other languages as a source for linguistic borrowing in present-day Norwegian. Most of the research on this topic has considered direct lexical loans, yet observations indicate that English is increasingly burrowing its way below the lexical surface of Norwegian – evident in the rising number of calques. This study investigates how a selection of recently observed multiword calques from English are evaluated by native Norwegian speakers. This is examined through acceptability judgements among young bilingual Norwegians (n = 83, mean age 18), and among two control groups comprising 10 bilingual adults (mean age 55) and 16 minimally bilingual seniors (mean age 75), respectively. A translation test was included to compare the judgements against production data. Based on our overall findings, we suggest that increased calquing is a sign of heightened proficiency in and exposure to the English language.

This paper deals with the grammatical differences and overlaps between the uses of the Finnish kuulua as a verb of auditory perceptibility (‘to be audible’) and as a verb of appearance, when employed in negative clauses (‘to be imperceptible (through unspecified sensory input)’). Both meanings entail perceptibility, existentiality and motion from the experienced towards the experiencer. However, they differ significantly in regard to the nature of the motion as well as the degree of animacy of the subject referent. As a verb of auditory perceptibility, kuulua accepts mainly inanimate subjects referring to a perceivable sound. As a verb of appearance, kuulua is mostly used with animate subjects. The semantic difference between the two constructions is accounted for in terms of objective and intersubjective meaning construal. The potential movement of a sound towards the experiencer concerns the relationship between the world and the subject of conceptualization, whereas the non-appearance of an animate being is viewed on the level of intersubjective cognitive coordination, with regard to interactional expectations. The results of this study shed light on the complex semantics of perceptibility. The analysis is based on 1,528 occurrences of kuulua in dialectal and literary data.

It has long been recognised that at least some linguistic expressions —such as the connectives but in English and mais in French, and the particles doch in German and jo in Norwegian— function to affect the audience’s inference or reasoning processes rather than, or in addition to, provide conceptual content. There is a debate, however, whether the inference procedures triggered by these linguistic expressions function primarily to affect the audience’s recognition of the communicator’s arguments or primarily to guide the audience’s comprehension process. I discuss this question with reference to an instructive example from an advertisement in Norwegian. The advertisement is an argumentative text where the modal particle jo achieves subtle argumentational and stylistic effects that differ from those achieved by the corresponding German modal particles doch or ja. I demonstrate how the procedural semantic analyses independently developed by Berthelin & Borthen (submitted) of jo and Unger (2016a, 2016b, 2016c) of ja and doch support a pragmatic-semantic account of the argumentational effects of these particles. Although the semantics I propose for the respective particles does not directly relate to argumentation, it is specific enough to affect argumentation in predictable ways. The reason for this is that comprehension procedures and argumentation procedures closely interact in processing ostensive stimuli (such as verbal utterances) for optimal relevance.

The aim of this article is to examine how police investigators reproduce interviewees’ utterances in narratives, in direct and indirect reported speech, and by enclosing words in reports in quotation marks. Drawing on a larger study of professional writing, the pertinent research question for the current investigation is how writing techniques in police interview reports convey evidential value in the form of reported utterances. A corpus of police reports on domestic violence is explored from the theoretical perspectives of critical discourse analysis, polyvocality and reportative evidentiality. A new analytical framework for polyvocal texts is developed in terms of utterance, source and framer. The results show that it is difficult to determine whether or not words placed within quotation marks are meant to present verbatim quotes. Another finding is that police investigators are not consistent in documenting utterances from different sources, or in showing whether utterances are embedded in other utterances. This may obscure the structure of the original events and the source of crucial utterances, resulting in unclear evidential status for police reports.

This article focuses on two Finnish personal constructions which can be used to create indexically open reference, i.e. they can be used to refer to generalized or shared human experiences. These two constructions are the zero-person construction and the open 2nd person singular construction. Using Finnish everyday conversational data, we (i) statistically analyze the distributional semantico-grammatical differences in the use of the zero-person and open 2nd person singular constructions, and (ii) examine these differences on a clausal and sequential level in interactional contexts. In our analysis, we integrate quantitative and qualitative methods. Our aim is to show that by mixing methods it is possible to both reveal the recurring semantico-grammatical patterns of the constructions across a large corpus and analyze how these patterns are shaped by the ongoing interaction.

This paper critically examines the exclusive use of the relative frequency of subordinate clauses as a measure of syntactic complexity in Second Language Acquisition (SLA) L2 acquisition and as an indicator of Second Language (L2) development. Following Lambert & Kormos (2014), it is argued that it is important to also take into account: (i) different subordinate clause types, (ii) item-based frequencies, and (iii) text genre. Longitudinal written data was collected among 21 Dutch-speaking foreign language learners of Swedish. Based on these data, the study shows that the subordination ratio (a common measure for syntactic complexity) alone was found to be insufficient as an indicator of syntactic complexity and L2 development, as hardly any significant differences were observed in the subordination ratios of the learners and native speakers. The study shows that other aspects are also relevant in determining the learners’ level of syntactic complexity as well as their L2 development, such as the internal structure and context of subordinate clauses, subordinate clause types, and especially the type-token ratio of subordinators used. The results showed a significant negative correlation between the subordination ratio of texts and the type-token ratio of subordinators. The aim of the study is to acknowledge the variation in the learners’ use of subordinate clause, in addition to the general subordination ratio, in order to arrive at a more nuanced view of syntactic complexity in second language acquisition.

On January 20, 2017, Republican candidate Donald J. Trump was sworn in as the 45th President of the United States. The run-up to this inauguration was marked by unusually hostile political rhetoric. For many, this linguistic divisiveness was fodder for the post-election surge in physical and verbal aggression. Using a mixed-method approach that combines actuarial and speech act assessment, this study examines 30 Anonymous Threatening Communications sent during the US presidential election for the presence and prevalence of (para)linguistic features associated with verbal and physical threat. The article argues for more forensic linguistic research into mainstream producers and consumers of hate-filled political rhetoric.

This paper addresses the problem of disguise in written threatening messages and investigates the connection between (meta-)linguistic awareness and the successful implementation of disguise strategies through the use of two experimental studies. The first study, a language production experiment with 116 participants, focused on the actual use of disguise strategies in the participants’ written texts. The second study, which had 167 respondents, was designed to investigate the perception of threats and respondents’ awareness and ideas of disguise. The findings of these studies indicate that sociolinguistic and metalinguistic awareness, awareness of one's own language production and the ability to manipulate language in other than outer forms of words are closely connected, which has important implications for forensic authorship analyses. Bredthauer (2013) estimated that approximately 20% of the authentic threatening messages in her corpus contained some form of disguise.

The new forms of written online communication offer a great resource for researchers interested in language variation and use, but more large-scale systematic research into the nature of the data is needed. For instance, Swedish blog data is often described as more informal and spoken in nature than traditional edited written material but overall systematic comparisons are lacking. This short communication contributes systematic comparisons between blog data and spoken and written registers by comparing measures such as type/token ratios and word frequencies. Type/token ratios of blog texts are found to lie between those for interactive speech and formal edited writing, whereas the distribution of words from different frequency bands is closer to the written material. Comparison of the ten most frequent word forms indicates that blog data resembles formal edited writing from a structural perspective, but also suggests that further studies into features of personal involvement may provide additional insights.

Lay participation in criminal trials has primarily been studied in common law systems, thereby mainly focusing on the separate role of juries. These studies have provided detailed accounts of language use between jurors during deliberation as well as their use of storytelling techniques and common-sense reasoning in decision-making. However, only few studies have focused on the linguistic learning processes that lay judges in other legal systems go through when they deliberate cases together with a professional judge both in reaching a verdict and in sentencing. In Denmark, lay judges are appointed for a period of four years, and this paper presents findings from an ethnographic study of lay judges and their growing experience with interactions in the deliberation room. It argues that lay judges learn to use legal language in order to strengthen their arguments vis-à-vis the professional judges. Lay judges feel that their influence is dependent on how well they master new, legal context-specific ways of expressing themselves, a point that may run counter to their legitimation as lay voices in an otherwise formalized judiciary.