This article discusses the fact that despite almost identical syntactically, the Mainland Scandinavian languages sometimes display clear syntactic differences. One instance regards the word order in constructions with låta, LET, where Danish accepts a word order that is not grammatically correct in Swedish. In this connection the impact of the Swedish reflexive pronoun sig is of interest, since in the presence of sig the Danish word order is allowed in Swedish as well. I will claim that there is a crucial difference between the LET-constructions in Danish and Swedish, where the Danish structural description however matches the Swedish one in constructions containing a reflexive pronoun. Furthermore, I will show that the Swedish reflexive pronoun sig is connected to the passive-s, since sig as well as -s sometimes bears a θ-role and sometimes not. The focus is primarily on Swedish and Danish, since Norwegian in most respects behaves like Swedish.

The aim of this article is to propose a syntactic analysis of a construction found in spoken Swedish, namely the so-called ba-construction, similar to the English like-construction. In the construction at hand, ba is usedto introduce a quotation in a narrative sequence of the speech, hence fulfils the role of the finite verb in the clause; the construction does not contain any main verb. In my analysis, however, I assume that there is a null verb UTTER in V°. In the presence of an adverbial (of time), the word order of the clause is classified as V3, which word order normally is ruled out in Swedish, being a V2 language. I will propose that in order to account for the deviating clause structure in the presence of ba, and in addition, ba and an adverbial, one needs a split CP analysis. My proposal is that ba is to be considered a finiteness marker, situated in Fin° and carrying a [Fin]-featwe, and that the adverbial, when present, is situated in Spec,ForceP, constituting a frame topic for the whole utterance.

In this article (“Communicative strategies in Swedish-Danish conversation areas – some pre liminary tendencies”), we aim at investigating the different strategies used by Swedes and Danes when discussing different topics with each other. The choice of studying com mu ni ca tion by Swedes and Danes is based on the relatively similar intercomprehension of the neighbour language in the two countries, and on the fact that the Øresund region, more than any other area in Scandinavia, proposes environments where intercomprehension and useful communicative strategies are necessary. The results presented in this article are based on two different investigations, each in turn consisting of classroom observations and interviews. We wish to stress that the studies are to be considered pre-investigations for a major, planned investigation, for which the tentative results reached so far constitute the ground. In the first investigation we refer to, Swedish and Danish students, around the age of 25, discuss a book they have read in advance. The second in vestigation was carried out as a follow-up of the tentative results of the fi rst one; hence we aimed at varying the level of comprehension of the neighbour language of the group members. In the second investigation, the participants, between 25 and 35 years of age and with at least 4 years of university studies, were given different topics as the starting point for an argumenta tion. The strategies of accommodation appearing in our material can be divided tentatively into three different levels, N1, N2, and N3 (‘N’ for Sw. ‘nivå’, Eng. ‘level’). What we here refer to as N2-accommodation is characterized by the participants’choice of words and partly also syntactic patterns, in order to make it easier for the rest of the group to understand. Further more, they also adjust their speech in another and more conscious way than N1-accommodators. N2-accommodation requires relatively fl uent skills in the neighbour language. The accommodation strategies categorised as N3 display a different pattern. In order for N3-accommodation to appear, some participants must, to some extent, know both languages involved, and the result of N3-accommodation points in two different directions. On the one hand, the degree of accommodation of those knowing both languages is so high that the others stop accommodating. As a result, the majority of the group members understand less than the participants involved in N2- or even N1-accommodation. On the other hand, we can also detect the opposite pattern: accommodation becomes superfl uous, and all participants stop accommodating.