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A right-dislocated phrase in Norwegian is either a full lexical phrase of the canonical sort, which is richer in semantic content than its coreferential intraclausal partner, or it is a pronoun which adds no semantic content that was not already present in the coreferential intraclausal phrase. A frequently occurring subcategory of right dislocation in Norwegian involves a lexical phrasein situand a coreferential dislocated pronoun. While an afterthought analysis of pronominal right-dislocated items may easily be dismissed offhand, an afterthought account of the canonical type of Norwegian right dislocation may seem initially plausible. However, on the basis of prosodic, syntactic and pragmatic criteria it is argued that there is no viable afterthought analysis of any subtype of right dislocation in Norwegian.

This paper argues that there is a phonological opposition between falling and non-falling utterance-terminal tunes in East Norwegian intonation. East Norwegian intonational foci are characterized by a rising pitch movement and there is no way that you can raise the pitch even further to express “rising intonation”. What you obtain instead is a distinction between a focal rise followed by a terminal fall in pitch and a focal rise without a subsequent falling terminal. The falling vs. non-falling terminal contrast is utilized differently in Intonation Units (IUs) with just one Intonational Phrase (IP) than in IUs with more than one Intonational Phrase. In the former type of IU structure a falling terminal constrains the illocutionary potential of the communicative act; in the latter type the falling terminal adds an attitudinal bias, without constraining the illocutionary potential. While most non-falling and falling terminals in connected discourse can ultimately be related to the difference between “openness” and “finality”, respectively, this intonational contrast is shown to have a seemingly quite different function in imperatives.

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