This paper is divided into two parts. In the first part it will be shown that Swedish is not a context free language. 1 This result goes in the same direction as those reported in Culy 1985, Shieber 1985 and Kac, Manaster-Ramer and Rounds 1987. These results have become particularly relevant in the light of Pullum and Gazdar 1982. In the second part we give evidence that neither indexed grammars (IG's, cf. Aho 1968, Gazdar 1988) nor tree adjoining grammars (TAG's, cf. Joshi 1985) are strongly adequate for characterizing Norwegian and Swedish extraction phenomena. Our data are taken from Maling and Zaenen 1982, and from E. Engdahl (personal communication).