This volume contains articles by Kristín M. Jóhannsdóttir, Ingebjørg Tonne, Mai Tungseth and Anne Tamm on perfectivity and telicity in some of the Nordic languages. In this introduction, we summarise the main claims and conclusions of each paper, and briefly discuss the recurring themes and differences in the analyses proposed in the articles included in this special issue of the Nordic Journal of Linguistics.

This is the first issue of Volume 30 of the Nordic Journal of Linguistics. The NJL is the journal of the Nordic Association of Linguists. Individuals may subscribe to the Nordic Journal of Linguistics by joining the NAL. The NAL membership form can be found on the Cambridge University Press web site of the NJL, <http://uk.cambridge.org/journals/njl/>, as well as on the NAL web site, <http://cc.joensuu.fi/linguistics/nal>. We are well aware that there have been problems with joining the NAL in the not so distant past, but we have reasons to hope that soon such problems will only be a distant memory.

Temporal adverbs can usually be divided into groups. Amongst those are adverbs of quantification, such as often, sometimes and never, and frequency adverbs, such as constantly and regularly. This paper presents some new data that shows that the Icelandic temporal adverb alltaf ‘always’ can be both an adverb of quantification and a frequency adverb. When alltaf modifies a progressive construction its meaning shifts, depending on the aktionsart of the restrictor. When the restrictor is punctual, alltaf functions as an adverb of quantification and has a frequency meaning (X is always happening at the time Y takes place). When the restrictor is durative, alltaf does not quantify over the event, and instead gets a durative meaning, similar to that of stöðugt ‘constantly’ (X happens constantly during the time Y takes place).

The second issue of Volume 31 (December 2008) of the Nordic Journal of Linguistics will be a special issue devoted to the syntax of nominals and noun phrases, edited by Lars-Olof Delsing and Kersti Börjars.

In this paper, the Norwegian progressive forms are examined by way of a corpus study, including both a monolingual corpus and a Norwegian–English parallel corpus. The corpora reveal patterns and properties of Norwegian progressives that are novel compared to those of a well-studied aspectual system like that in English. The study shows that the progressives should be grouped into two subgroups, according to their combinatorial and semantic properties. The array of properties that is brought out by the examination of the monolingual and parallel corpora is accounted for in a formal semantic frame, based on works by Dowty (1979) and Krifka (1992, 1998), and also drawing on insights from, among others, Rothstein (1999, 2004).

This paper gives an account of the event and argument structure of past participles, and the linking between argument structure and valence structure. It further accounts for how participles form perfect and passive constructions with auxiliaries. We assume that the same participle form is used in both types of construction. Our claim is that the valence structure of a past participle is predictable from its semantic type, and that the valence structure predicts which auxiliary a past participle combines with in perfect constructions and whether the past participle may occur in passive constructions. Our approach sets itself apart from similar approaches, cf. e.g. Heinz & Matiasek (1994), Kathol (1994), Pollard (1994) and Müller (2003), with its strong emphasis on semantics.

In this paper, I take a closer look at a set of observations concerning word order and co-occurrence restrictions on verb-particle constructions, benefactive double object constructions and resultative constructions in Norwegian. While a particle can co-occur with both a beneficiary DP and a resultative AP, beneficiary DPs and resultatives cannot co-occur at all. I give an analysis in terms of the system proposed in Ramchand (2006), where I argue that the co-occurrence restrictions follow from the syntactic structure assumed together with independent properties of adjectival resultative constructions and verb-particle constructions.

Deverbal nouns are often referred to as hybrids, containing both verbal and nominal features. In many languages deverbal nouns tend to develop into what Vendler (1967) called perfect nouns. Various stages of this development in Norwegian are proposed, drawing on Grammaticalization Theory and Lexicalization Theory. Frequency data are provided from a large newspaper corpus. The deverbal nouns are analyzed as going through a process of lexicalization where reduction in compositionality, reduced token frequency and increased idiosyncrasy are central elements. This process is triggered by relevance to the root, language use, isomorphism and the maximal difference principle. The article shows that Norwegian deverbal nouns are in a state of flux and that even different members of the same morphological type may behave quite differently syntactically and semantically.

This paper discusses telicity and perfectivity in Estonian. Neither of these categories corresponds exactly to the Estonian object case alternation, which is argued to reflect predicate or clause aspectual properties and not the NP-related properties of objects. The aim of this account is to accommodate the systematic compatibility of verb classes with certain clausal aspectual object case marking patterns. The paper proposes a way of understanding the interaction between verbal and clausal aspect in terms of boundedness and formalizes it in the framework of Lexical Functional Grammar (LFG). The features of verbs and case markers determine the clausal aspect from different constituents at the syntactic level of constituent structure. The information is unified at another syntactic level, functional structure.

This article presents a typed feature structure grammar formalism for Mainland Scandinavian which outperforms existing grammars in several respects: it is multilingual and captures dialectal variation and many typological facts, and it is computationally efficient. Our reference point is the grammar formalism of Underwood (1997). It is proven that Underwood's formalism is intractable. Our formalism improves on this result, i.e. it is decidable in polynomial time. The article covers the phenomena covered in Underwood (1997) and non-local dependencies.