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In the present investigation, the intelligibility of 17 Scandinavian language varieties and standard Danish was assessed among young Danes from Copenhagen. In addition, distances between standard Danish and each of the 17 varieties were measured at the lexical level and at different phonetic levels. In order to determine how well these linguistic levels can predict intelligibility, we correlated the intelligibility scores with the linguistic distances and we carried out a number of regression analyses. The results show that for this particular set of closely related language varieties phonetic distance is a better predictor of intelligibility than lexical distance. Consonant substitutions, vowel insertions and vowel shortenings contribute significantly to the prediction of intelligibility.

The past decade has witnessed an ever-increasing interest in insubordination and related phenomena, particularly since the appearance of Evans' ( 2007) seminal paper 'Insubordination and its uses'. Since then, numerous studies have been published on various types of insubordinate constructions in a wide variety of typologically different languages from different analytical perspectives (see especially Evans and Watanabe 2016a and references therein).What makes insubordination so intriguing is that it presents a challenge for traditional grammatical frameworks owing to its ambivalent, Janus-like appearance, which combines subordinate structure with main clause function. This dual nature is neatly summarized in Evans's definition, which has by now become accepted currency in the field: "the conventionalized main clause use of what, on prima facie grounds, appear to be formally subordinate clauses" (Evans 2007: 367). 1 An insubordinate clause thus has the appearance of a subordinate clause, but has been reanalysed as a main clause. It is in this subordinate form that insubordination differs from nonsubordination (de Vries e.g. 2007), which is described as a strategy of paratactic text planning that includes parenthesis, apposition, coordination, juxtaposition and hedging. 2 Some illustrative examples of insubordination are given in ( 1) to (4).(1) ENGLISH (ICE-GB:s1a-089-159)If you'll just come next door.() SWEDISH (D'Hertefelt 2015: 23, IC) https://issuu.com/danielheiniemi/docs/o4u05_tr/19) Att du aldrig kan passa tider! COMP you never can.PRS watch.INF times 'Why can't you ever keep track of the time!' (lit.: That you never can watch the time!) (3) SPANISH (MABPE2-01b, COLA M) Juan (.) que v-a a llov-er VOC COMP go-PRS.IND.3SG to rain-INF 'John, [QUE] it's going to rain. (..) […]' 1 This is a refined version of an earlier definition given in Evans (1988: 255), which identified insubordination as "the use of a formally subordinate clause type as a main clause". 2 De Vries defines nonsubordination as "parataxis in the broad sense. It means the equipollent ranking of clauses or constituents: if β is paratactically construed with respect to α, β is not subordinated to α, and β does not restrict the meaning of α; rather it adds information to α." (de Vries 2007: 203; n.d.); cf. in this context also Heine et al.'s (2016) notion of "theticals".(4) JAPANESE (Evans 2009:1) Are wo mi-te ! that ACC look-CNJ 'Look at that!'As can be seen from the examples, insubordinate clauses have all the formal cues of subordinate clauses. These are, for instance, subordinators, infinitive, participal or subjunctive inflections on the verbs, subordinate clause word order, depending on the language-specific markers of subordination. What is absent, however, is a matrix clause. Instead, they areat least in their prototypical formsstand-alone structures as a result of their reanalysis over time as conventionalized independent constructions. Insubordination thus has an inherent diachronic side to it. Insubordinate clauses may look like subord...

It has long been recognized that many instances of change that have been discussed within the framework of grammaticalization studies notoriously defy categorization, for instance because they share properties of grammaticalization and lexicalization (Brinton & Traugott 2005), or because they share some properties of grammaticalization, but not all of them, as in the case of discourse markers (e.g. Ocampo 2006). In order to avoid these classification issues, we will argue that it is more useful to reduce grammaticalization and related changes to their “main mechanisms” (formal reanalysis and semantic reinterpretation), “primitive changes” (micro-changes on the levels of phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics and/or discourse), and “side effects” (e.g. obligatorification or layering). In grammaticalization and related changes, formal reanalysis and semantic reinterpretation tend to coincide with different sets of primitive changes. Primitive changes will be defined as ternary parameters with the values reduction, expansion, or zero, and it will be seen that they tend to cluster in different ways. Some of these clusters may coincide with changes traditionally labeled “grammaticalization”, “degrammaticalization”, or “lexicalization”, but changes may also cluster in alternative ways. This novel approach to composite changes we term the “clustering approach”, and we aim to show that this model of analysis allows for a more fine-grained account of composite changes than definition-based taxonomies.