Filtyp
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
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 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
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
This brief article investigates the restrictions on Mainland Scandinavian relative clause extraction that have figured in the literature on island constraints. The conclusion is that none of these restrictions can be regarded as constraints on relative clause extraction per se and therefore that the peripheral status standardly assigned to Mainland Scandinavian relative clause extraction cannot be
This paper is a contribution to the never settled debate on reference, negation and presupposition of existence in the linguistic/philosophical literature. Based on Swedish and English data, the discussion is an attempt to present a unified account of the opposing views put forward in the works of Aristotle, Frege (1892), Russell (1905) and Strawson (1950). The starting point is the observed asymm
The topic of my article is Object Shift and optionality, mainly from a Swedish viewpoint. I present the result of a survey, which shows that informant‟s intuitions concerning the wellformedness of shifted and non-shifted sentences vary to a large degree. For sentences with monotransitive verbs and monosyllabic object pronouns, such as den (it.common) ‟it‟, the shifted alternative is preferred, whe
Our point of departure is a new use of the question tag eller hur (or how) „isn‟t it?‟ in Swedish: (i) Eller hur ska vi åka till Italien i sommar? or how shall we go to Italy in summer „We will go to Italy this summer,. won‟t we?‟ We argue that eller hur used in this way is an overt Yes/No-question operator, and that it patterns with visst and nog, which we propose are two other Yes/No-question op
