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Abstract This paper offers a new description and explanation of morphological agreement, argument-verb agreement in particular. The hypothesis explored is that argument-verb agreement is directly related to selection of arguments (s-selection), i.e. s-selectional features are in fact ф-features ([PERSON, NUMBER(, GENDER)], and that morphological argument-verb agreement mirrors this relation. Call
This paper is an attempt to solve the somewhat elusive polarity item licensing properties of wh-questions in Swedish. As has been observed by Klima (1964) for English, NPIs are gener¬ally not compatible with genuinely information seeking wh-questions, but tend to induce rhe¬torical interpretations. Distin-guishing between three types of wh-questions and the kind of information they request, I will
This paper argues in line with recent work by Pesetsky and Torrego that given the operation Agree there is no need for the concept Abstract Case in Narrow Syntax. Morphological case exists in many languages, and is here, following a suggestion by Halldór Sigurðsson, seen as the result of an instruction to PF how to translate syntactic structure into morphology. I will call this instruction CAM, sh
Embedded declarative V2 clauses can appear in a number of different contexts in Norwegian and Swedish. What all these clauses have in common is that they have illocutionary force—they are asserted. I argue that a syntactic Force head is responsible for the illocutionary force as well as for the V2 order. Thus, the syntax and the semantics of embedded V2 clauses are closely tied together. The analy
This paper addresses the question whether a connection exists between subject omission and discourse anchorage in early Swedish child language. By analysing data from three Swedish children, I investigate whether previous mentioning in the discourse affects the occurrence of subject omission. A Danish study by Hamann & Plunkett (1998) reported that no connection between subject omissions and d
Within the Scandinavian languages, there is a notable variation regarding verb agreement. Holmberg & Platzack (1995) suggested that this basic feature is linked to both verb raising and the presence of a handful of syntactic phenomena, such as stylistic fronting, oblique subjects, transitive expletives etc. In agreement-rich languages such as Icelandic and Faroese, the finite verb thus raises
In this paper, we suggest that the properties of Swedish present participles can be accounted for if we take a syntactic approach to lexical categories in the lines of Distributed Morphology. We depart from the fact that Swedish words ending in -ande/-ende have the same denotation whether they appear attributively, predicatively, or nominally. Syntactically however, -ande/-ende-derivations appear
The Swedish particle så is attested in different usages. In one of these, så introducesassertive clauses forming the foreground, or the skeleton, of a narrative. It is argued that, ifthe distribution of this particular particle is to be captured in a theory of syntax, such atheory needs to incorporate notions relating to narrative discourse or, in other words, atheory in which grammatical statemen
This paper presents a novel observation on Swedish subordinate clause structure. I show that in embedded V2 clauses, negation may only precede quantified subjects in the position following the complementizer; this is the very same limitation as found in the first position of main clauses. This correlation I take to provide a strong argument for assuming V-to-C movement in embedded V2 clauses. This
The displacement operations that Chomsky (1999) terms ‘themati¬zation/extraction’ and takes to be phonological of nature, are truly syntactical operations. Concerning leftward displacement, I add another argument for its syntactic nature to those already known from the literature. My argument is based on the behaviour of Mainland Scandinavian bare singular nominals, which neither move to Spec-IP
Pseudocoordination is a construction where two verbs or VPs appear to be conjoined by what looks like the conjunction och ‘and’. In my paper I focus on pseudocoordination with gå ‘walk, go’ as Verb 1, in particular cases where this has been claimed to give rise to a “surprise effect” (Wiklund 2005, 2008). I set out from the assumption that Verb 1 in pseudocoordination is a light verb, which, follo
Like most L2 speakers, speakers of early L1, children with SLI, and Broca’s aphasics lack the or¬dinary speaker’s ability to produce utterances on line with almost no errors. Often they produce well-formed utterances, but quite frequently they produce errors that are almost non-existent in the speech of normal grown-up speakers. In my paper I will suggest, based on empirical material from Swedish,
It is well known that (some speakers of) Norwegian allow long distance binding, defined here as binding across a finite clause boundary. A number of factors that facilitate long distance binding have also been identified. In the study reported on here, 93 native speakers of Norwegian judged 30 sentences in a web-based questionnaire. The results show that V2 order in the embedded clause reduces the
This paper claims that formal features do not belong to syntax. A revised version of the paper has the title 'Remarks on feature', see http://ling.auf.net/lingBuzz/000334
In this paper I discuss doubling with the neuter pronominal det ‘it’ in Swedish. Det may double common gender and/or plural noun phrases too, which gives rise to what looks like disagreement. The proposed analysis takes as its point of departure so-called pancake-sentences, which are sentences with a common gender and/or plural noun phrase subject, but where the predicative adjective agrees in the
In this article we report on a systematic comparison of presentational sentencesin Icelandic and Swedish, looking in particular at possible thematicroles of the pivot and how they correlate with positional options. Despitesome well-known differences between the languages (only Icelandic allows‘high’ IP-pivots and pivots with transitive verbs), it turns out that the restrictionson VP-pivots are sim
