Curt Rice

Dialectal Variation in Norwegian Imperatives

This article discusses the formation of imperatives in Norwegian. It focuses on the cases in which phonological well-formedness requirements interfere with imperative formation. Several attested solutions are presented and receive an optimality theoretic analysis. Some speakers invoke a purely phonological solution, e.g. sonorant devoicing. Others borrow from elsewhere in the paradigm, e.g. taking the infinitive form and using it as the imperative. A third group avoid the constructions altogether, necessitating an analysis in which the null parse is optimal.

Is it language relearning or language reacquisition? Hints from a young boy’s code-switching during his journey back to his native language

Do we reacquire or relearn latent native languages? How can we tell? The language used by a 4-year-old ‘language reactivator’ in his preschool setting was audio recorded for several weeks upon return to the language community of his latent native language. Through a sociocultural lens focusing particularly on the use of code-switching and mixing during the language reactivation process, we analyzed how this young boy spoke, how that gradually changed over time and how he used the social and linguistic resources around him to facilitate that. The type and content of the boy’s code-switching and mixing showed time- and proficiency-related patterns that were both similar to and different from what one would expect of bilingual and of non-native language learners. Furthermore, the boy showed resourcefulness in how he used the linguistic resources around him — interacting primarily with interlocutors who had some competence in both his active and latent native languages early on until he developed sufficient proficiency to interact in the reactivated target language with his monolingual peers thereafter. This suggests a degree of learner mindfulness that distinguishes the language reactivation process from what one might expect were the process purely a matter of reacquiring bilingual proficiency.

Women in science and medicine

Your Editorial “Promoting women in science and medicine” (Nov 20, p 1712)1 is timely. The genSET science leaders panel2 analysed gender and sex bias in basic research and found that medical treatments for women are less evidence-based than for men. Pain research demonstrates this point well: 79% of animal studies published in the journal Pain over the past 10 years included males only, with a mere 8% of studies on females only, and another 4% explicitly designed to test for sex differences (the rest did not specify).3 Editors of peer-reviewed journals can require analysis of sex and gender effects when selecting papers for publication. The US Journal of the National Cancer Institute does it as a matter of “commitment to sound, scientific research”: “where appropriate, clinical and epidemiological studies should be analysed to see if there is an effect of sex or any of the major ethnic groups. If there is no effect, it should be so stated in Results”.4 The Journal of the American College of Cardiology and Circulation (the American Heart Association journal), also adopted this practice. Nature journals are at present considering whether to require the inclusion of such information.5 Could The Lancet adopt such guidelines as part of its gender equality and scientific quality policy?

Gaps and repairs at the phonology–morphology interface

The paper discusses phonologically motivated gaps in inflectional paradigms. A model is offered in which the appearance of gaps is based on a tension between markedness constraints, faithfulness constraints, and constraints which require the expression of morphological categories. After presenting the model, additional implications are analyzed. Situations in which the same problem has different solutions in different morphological contexts are predicted insofar as constraints requiring the expression of different categories can vary in their ranking relative to some faithfulness constraint. Hence, the same phonotactic problem can yield a gap in one situation and a repair in another. This prediction is illustrated and further details of the prediction are explored, including the identification of a situation requiring a more restrictive version of the model. This is achieved by drawing on Smiths (2001) proposal that faithfulness constraints can be indexed to lexical categories to model this situation.

Scientific (E)quality

Abstract The increased presence of women at all levels of higher education, from undergraduate student to full professor, has given increased currency to an argument that gender balance at the highest levels of academia will inevita- bly be achieved, merely through the passage of time. In this essay, that argument is challenged, both on the basis of its logic and on the basis of empirical studies on the rate of increase. Development of new measures to hasten the achievement of gender balance can now be motivated by arguments based on research in new domains, which augment traditional arguments for gender equality grounded in social justice perspectives. Three examples of arguments from new domains are presented, connecting gender balance in research groups, research questions, and the leadership of research institutions to scientific quality. Focusing on scientific quality, it is argued, entails focusing on gender equality.

Gjert Kristoffersen (2000). The phonology of Norwegian . Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pp. xvi+366.

The phonology of Norwegian is the ninth book in the Oxford University Press series The Phonology of the Worlds Languages . With Kristoffersens book, nearly half of this series is devoted to studies of Germanic languages, in which context his work supplements previous volumes on Dutch (Booij 1995), German (Wiese 1996) and English (Hammond 1999). The phonology of Norwegian fits comfortably into this series and the author has been successful in achieving his stated purpose of giving a thorough presentation of the phonological facts of Norwegian as well as offering analyses of many of those facts. The phonology of Norwegian can be seen as supplanting Kristoffersen (1991), the authors doctoral dissertation from the University of Tromso, which has until this point arguably been the most comprehensive discussion of Norwegian phonology.