This article introduces the Finnish Corpus of Online Registers (FinCORE) representing the full range of registers – situationally defined text varieties such as news and blogs – on the Finnish Internet. The extreme range of language use found online has challenged the study of registers. It has been unclear what registers the entire Internet includes, and if they can be sufficiently defined to allow for their analysis or classification, previous studies focusing on restricted sets of registers and English. FinCORE features 10,754 texts from the unrestricted web, manually annotated for their register using a scheme originally established for the Corpus of Online Registers of English (CORE). We present the FinCORE registers and compare them to CORE. Finally, we show that the FinCORE registers are sufficiently well-defined to allow for their automatic identification, thus opening novel possibilities for both linguistics and web-as-corpus research. FinCORE is published under an open license.

Finnish nonfinite clauses constitute a complex grammatical class with a seemingly chaotic mix of verbal and nominal properties. Thirteen nonfinite constructions, their selection, control, thematic role assignment, nonfinite agreement, embedded subjects, and syntactic status were targeted for analysis. An analysis is proposed which derives their syntactic and semantic properties by relying on a computational model of human information processing. The model analyzes Finnish nonfinite constructions as truncated clauses with one functional layer above the verb phrase. Research methods from naturalistic cognitive science and computational linguistics are considered as potentially useful tools for linguistics.

The aim of the study is to compare the use of two different particles that are used in Icelandic conversation: the native form ha and the English borrowing what. The research questions are as follows: (1) What are the similarities and differences between the two forms in terms of turn-position, sequential placement, prosody, and functions?, and (2) What can the comparison tell us about the borrowing of discourse particles from one language to another? The data consisted of 28 hours and 36 minutes of conversation. The methodology employed in the study is that of interactional linguistics. The study shows that although ha and what have some similarities in certain environments, there are certain differences between the two forms. What is more limited in use than ha, both in terms of functions and position within a turn.

This study presents results of two experiments using supervised machine-learning models to examine individual Finnish speakers’ dialectal backgrounds. Data come from interviews conducted with heritage speakers of Finnish in northern Wisconsin and are compared to data from the Finnish Dialect Syntax Archive. The models were constructed and then, following successful validation testing, used to identify the dialectal background of five individual American Finnish speakers. Results showed individual variation in dialectal backgrounds and some correlation to speakers’ likely language input. Our approach offers a new methodological tool for examining speakers’ dialectal backgrounds in situations of language contact.

This corpus study compares the use of Danish prepositions in the writing of L1 users of Danish to that of L2 users of Danish (with English as their L1). It examines to what extent non-standard usage is a specific L2 phenomenon and to what degree the challenges with prepositions are shared between the L1 and L2 group. We analyze the distribution and characteristics of non-standard usage involving four frequent Danish prepositions: til ‘to’, i ‘in’, på ‘on’, and for ‘for’. The results show that L2 texts are characterized by a larger share of non-standard tokens and by confusion of prepositions and non-prepositions. Yet, both L1 texts and L2 texts have non-standard usage and both have possible English calques. Based on the similarities between the two groups, we recommend that future studies include naturally occurring L1 production as a baseline for describing characteristics of L2 production.

Decades of research on bilingual grammars corroborate the integrated nature of these systems, leading to the conjecture that these representations are ‘shared’ (Marian & Spivey 2003, Kroll & Gollan 2014, Putnam et al. 2018). A specific population of bilinguals, namely heritage language speakers, shows a tendency for highly variable allomorphy (Polinsky 2018, Putnam et al. 2021); however, with this aspect of grammar that is often in a state of flux, there are instances of stability. Here we thoroughly investigate the stability of tense allomorphy of in North American Norwegian (NAmNo), a moribund heritage language spoken in the Upper Midwestern United States. Formally, we build upon initial observations provided by Lykke (2020), showing how a late-insertion approach to the syntax–phonological interface in combination with events, features, and precedence (EFP) phonology (Raimy 2000, Papillon 2020, Idsardi 2022) provides a straightforward account of the structural complexities that determine exponency in bilingual grammars.

This article contributes to research on pragmatic borrowings through its exploration of their prosodic features in interactional turns. The pragmatic borrowings focused on are actual or enacted responses that demonstrate a stance towards the interlocutor’s previous turn. The data are drawn from podcast conversations in Finland Swedish. The qualitative exploration of the data, which draws on principles from Interactional Linguistics and uses sequential and acoustic analyses, focuses on an in-depth analysis of four examples of response tokens. Our analysis illustrates that borrowed response tokens are not used frequently, but when they are used, they are marked by speakers prosodically, rendering them stylistically salient within the context of the interaction. The borrowed response tokens demonstrate specific interactional meanings, such as affect, humor, farce and upgrading. These findings demonstrate that, like other pragmatic borrowings, responses are integrated into the overall repertoire of the receiving speech community, serving as stylistic variants alongside heritage forms.

In this article, we report on a number of violations of (or exceptions to) the so-called V2 constraint in different variants of Icelandic. The main purpose is to investigate what these violations can tell us about the nature of the V2 constraint, its vulnerability, the limits of syntax, and about children’s ability to sort out what is relevant and what is not in the input they hear during the acquisition period. Three main explanatory possibilites are taken under consideration: the use and acceptance of sentences with V2 violations in Icelandic (i) is due to English influence, (ii) indicates an expansion of patterns existing in the language for language-internal reasons, (iii) is due to a task effect. In brief, our results support (i) for heritage Icelandic but not for non-heritage Icelandic, while different subsets of our data are best accounted for in terms of either (ii) or (iii).

This article examines the use of fuck and fucking in Danish, with a focus on their interactional functions for assessing. Data consist of 76 cases found in informal Danish conversations, analyzed within the framework of Interactional Linguistics. Fuck functions as a reactive interjection that prefaces various types of clauses. However, fuck followed by a copula clause develops an assessment out of a telling. Followed by hvor ‘how’ and an adjective, fuck performs agreeing assessment. Hvad fuck ‘what the fuck’ may occur in questions. Fucking is commonly used in copula clause assessments but also within noun phrases when no response is elicited. The study concludes that the use of fuck and fucking in Danish differs from their use in English, but also from the Danish swearword fanden ‘the devil, damn’. The conclusions indicate that interactional functions and constructions are an important factor for understanding the pragmatics of borrowing and swearing.

This paper examines patterns in an Estonian–English bilingual child’s spontaneous speech, employing a computational application of the traceback method, which is used in usage-based linguistics. Forty-five hours of data were analyzed to check what proportion of patterns from code-mixed utterances are attested in the child’s monolingual data and in her input. Pattern overlap between the child’s and the caregivers’ speech was also examined. Results show that about one-third of code-mixed utterances can be traced back to the child’s input and one-third also to her own monolingual data. A little over half of the child’s utterances are either chunks or frame-and-slot patterns from the caregivers’ speech. These results make it evident that the traceback method can also be applied to language pairs that are genealogically more distant, though limitations exist.

The focus of this article is on OKAY as a resource for regulating language and constructing norm centres in authentic consultation meetings related to academic writing and recorded in Finland and Sweden. It gives an overview of all occurrences of OKAY in the interactional data in question, revealing that the word occurs frequently in academic writing consultations in Finnish, Finland Swedish, and Sweden Swedish. There are similarities in the frequency of its use and the distribution of occurrences between counsellor and student in the Finnish and the Finland-Swedish data, whereas the Sweden-Swedish counselling interactions follow a slightly different pattern. Through the lens of conversation analysis and systemic–functional linguistics, we further demonstrate how the counsellors and the students use the evaluative content word OKAY as a resource for regulating both academic writing and the counselling interaction, and thereby position themselves epistemically and orient towards different centres of norms.

This paper starts by observing that an old loan word from English, the previously unstudied Finnish response particle jep ‘yep’, has recently become more frequent and gained new interactional uses. Using Conversation Analysis as a method, the paper outlines the contemporary uses of jep in messaging interaction collected in 2015–2023. It suggests that jep does not merely function as an affirmative answer, as suggested in contemporary dictionaries. Instead, it occurs in agreement and affiliation-relevant contexts, and it is used to confirm the validity of the previous speaker’s point of view and to construct it as an opinion that is shared between the participants. Although the article focuses on synchronic analyses, it also presents observations on the changes in the use of jep, paving the way for a more diachronically oriented study on the particle.

This paper presents an acoustic study of coarticulation of Argentine Danish /ts/ using Centre of Gravity (CoG) as the acoustic measure. It shows that the articulation of /ts/ is affected by the roundedness of the following vowel, and that this is more prevalent among speakers of Argentine Danish than among speakers of Modern Danish as spoken in Denmark. The analysis also shows that within Argentine Danish, the speakers of the isolated settlement Eldorado have a larger effect of roundedness in their articulation of /ts/ than the speakers of the settlements in the Pampas and in Buenos Aires. The results are discussed from the perspective of phonological theory on enhanced coarticulation as a source of sound change and from the perspective of theory of language change in heritage languages.

This study compares the uses of the acronym wtf (‘what the fuck’) in digitally mediated text-based interactions in three typologically distinct languages: American English (source language), and Finnish and Chilean Spanish (recipient languages). The data consist of tweets extracted from the social media platform X. Interactional Linguistics and Digital Conversation Analysis are employed to examine the functions performed by wtf in different positions in a tweet and interaction. Instances of wtf were annotated to describe its uses in the source language and to compare them with those observed in the recipient languages. The study shows that in all three languages, wtf is used in various tweet-internal and sequential positions. These uses expressed the writer’s disbelief, astonishment, and a problem in acceptance towards prior content. The analysis concludes that the pragmatic functions of wtf in American English undergo a narrowing when it is used in Finnish and Chilean Spanish.