Volume 59, Issue 1 - 1

This chapter is “typological” in two senses: Whereas the first section considers some of the sounds and sound patterns of Swedish from a universal-typological point of view, the second section discusses the considerable phonetic variability observed across the various dialects of the language. It is argued that, with some exceptions, Swedish is typologically fairly mainstream. Exceptions concern particularly the inventory of non-back rounded vowels, voiceless fricatives and partly prosody. The Swedish dialects are found to contain several distinct consonant and vowel types that are not encountered in Standard varieties. It is also found that the intonational structure of the Swedish dialects is fairly complex and diversified. The third section concludes the chapter with some informal observations of possible sound changes in progress.

Most of the Scandinavian languages and dialects exhibit a tonal accent distinction. Invariably the lexical tone is associated to the primary stressed syllable. The chief variables which instantiate the accent typology include the value of individual tones (L, H, LH), the use of spreading and interpolation, and the behaviour of the prominence tone (usually, but not always, the tone used for focus). Variables related to the prominence tone involve the association (or not) to a secondary stress, and rightward/leftward orientation (i.e. alignment). Beside the phonological typology, the article briefly discusses a couple of distributional sub-typologies relating to morphology and the lexicon.

In this paper we look at the case systems in three Scandinavian vernaculars spoken in Sweden, viz. Elfdalian, Skelleftemål and Vätömål in relation to (i) problems concerning possible case systems and ways in which they can break down; (ii) earlier claims about case hierarchies; (iii) the interaction of case, number and definiteness in nominal paradigms. One type of system considered in the paper is based on the opposition between a default case (nominative/accusative) and a dative – an option excluded by previously suggested generalizations on possible case systems. Our data illustrate several different ways in which one and the same older four-member case system has been reduced, and our conclusion is that a strict hierarchy here cannot be established. The vernaculars studied are also relevant to the question of markedness relations in nominal paradigms: they give additional support to the claim that definite nouns may show more distinctions than indefinite ones, and counter to usual assumptions, singular nouns sometimes show fewer case distinctions than plural nouns, which may be explained by the uniform marking of the dative plural across all paradigms.

This paper outlines the basic facts of Swedish clause-level word order, in particular the distribution of the verb-second (V2) phenomenon. A sample of other (Germanic and non-Germanic) V2 languages is discussed, and possible correlates of embedded V2 are explored. Finally, it is claimed that cross-linguistic facts suggest that embedded V2 does not involve recursion of a discrete category C (the prototypical complementizer position), but rather that what is referred to as C in the generative V2 literature is a trivial clustering of syntactic features onto a single (unlabelled) head.

This paper will provide a typological-contrastive sketch of the lexical semantic structure of the verb lexicon in Swedish based on data from translation corpora and the information on lexical typology currently available in published works. As a background, a brief survey is given of basic verbs in European languages. The major part of the paper is devoted to sketches of the most frequent verbs within some of the most basic semantic fields such as Posture, Location, Motion and Possession. Language-specific lexical differentiation is exemplified by the verbs of putting sätta-ställa-lägga and an example of an extensive language-specific pattern of polysemy is presented in an analysis of the very frequent verb få ‘get, may’. The paper also discusses some cases of grammaticalization such as the use of gå ‘go’ as a marker of a specific type of possibility.