What's first?: on the left periphery in Swedish declaratives
Author
Editor
- Johan Brandtler
- David Håkansson
- Stefan Huber
- Eva Klingvall
Summary, in English
I present the result of a small investigation of the sentence pattern in a sample of spoken Swedish. As expected, the typical constituent order is SV – more than 70 percent of the declaratives displayed this constituent order. This result is in line with previous investigations, but the figure is higher. An absolute majority of sentences have a pronominal element in sentence initial position, in most cases a subject pronoun, but it could also be an object pronoun or an adverb. Since information structure and prosody are interrelated, this means that there is a strong bias in Swedish to have a backgrounded or thematic element that is prosodically light, immediately preceding the finite verb.
Due to the fact that preverbal doubling, i.e. the sentence pattern XP – pronominal – FV, is quite common, I suggest, tentatively, a new definition of the V2 constraint, which is based on semantics. In one sense this means that Swedish can be a V3 language; V3 is grammatical, provided the elements preceding the finite verb are semantically indistinct.
Due to the fact that preverbal doubling, i.e. the sentence pattern XP – pronominal – FV, is quite common, I suggest, tentatively, a new definition of the V2 constraint, which is based on semantics. In one sense this means that Swedish can be a V3 language; V3 is grammatical, provided the elements preceding the finite verb are semantically indistinct.
Department/s
Publishing year
2012
Language
English
Pages
359-372
Publication/Series
Discourse & Grammar : A Festschrift in Honor of Valéria Molnár
Document type
Book chapter
Publisher
Centre for Languages and Literature, Lund University
Topic
- Languages and Literature
Keywords
- SVO
- subject initial sentences
- V2
- V3
- declaratives
Status
Published
Research group
- GRIMM
ISBN/ISSN/Other
- ISBN: 978-91-637-0411-6