Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-q99xh Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-24T16:54:41.409Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Optional expletive subjects in Swedish

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 December 2012

Elisabet Engdahl
Elisabet Engdahl*
Affiliation:
Department of Swedish, University of Gothenburg, Box 200, SE-405 30 Gothenburg, Sweden. [email protected]
Get access

Abstract

This article investigates the use of non-referential subjects in contemporary Swedish. Given that Swedish has developed a strong subject requirement, expletive subjects are expected to be used in all clauses which lack a referential subject. In spoken Swedish, however, expletive and quasi-argument subjects are optional in utterances where there is an initial det ‘it’ which is linked to an empty position inside a finite or non-finite complement. The paper establishes that there are certain similarities between these examples and tough constructions but that the examples involving finite complements cannot be subsumed under a predication analysis which seems appropriate for the tough cases. Based on a number of authentic recorded examples, I discuss the processing of utterances with fronted anaphoric pronouns and point to certain similarities with parasitic gaps. The paper closes with a comparison with other Germanic languages.

Keywords

expletiveEPPquasi-argumentsubjectSwedishtopicalizationtopic drop
Type
Research Article
Information
Nordic Journal of Linguistics , Volume 35 , Issue 2 , October 2012 , pp. 99 - 144
Copyright
Copyright © Nordic Association of Linguistics 2012

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

CORPORA

Gothenburg Spoken Language Corpus, http://www.ling.gu.se/projekt/tal/index.cgi?PAGE=3Google Scholar
Nordic Dialect Corpus, http://www.tekstlab.uio.no/nota/scandiasyn/Google Scholar
NoTa: Corpus of spoken Norwegian in Oslo, http://www.tekstlab.uio.no/nota/english/index.htmlGoogle Scholar
Språkbanken [The Swedish Language Bank], http://spraakbanken.gu.se/eng/startGoogle Scholar

REFERENCES

Allwood, Jens (ed.). 1999. Talspråksfrekvenser [Spoken language frequencies] (Gothenburg Papers in Theoretical Linguistics S21). Göteborg: Department of Linguistics.Google Scholar
Andersson, Lars-Gunnar. 1982. What is Swedish an Exception to? Extractions and Island Constraints. In Engdahl & Ejerhed (eds.), 33–45.Google Scholar
Bennis, Hans. 1986. Gaps and Dummies. Dordrecht: Foris.Google Scholar
Bennis, Hans. 2000. Adjectives and argument structure. In Coopmans, Peter (ed.), Lexical Specification and Insertion, 27–67. Amsterdam & Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Besten, Hans den. 1977. On the interaction of root transformations and lexical deletive rules. Ms., University of Amsterdam. [Published 1983 in Abraham, Werner (ed.), On the Formal Syntax of the Westgermania, 47–131. Amsterdam: John Benjamins; republished 1989 in Hans den Besten, Studies in West Germanic Syntax, 44–100. Amsterdam: Rodopi.]Google Scholar
Biberauer, Theresa & Richards, Marc. 2006. True optionality: When the grammar doesn't mind. In Boeckx (ed.), 35–67.Google Scholar
Boeckx, Cedric (ed.). 2006. Minimalist Essays. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Borsley, Robert D. & Börjars, Kersti (eds.). 2011. Non-Transformational Syntax: Formal and Explicit Models of Grammar. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Borthen, Kaja. 2004. The Norwegian type-anaphor det. In Branco, António, McEnery, Tony & Mitokov, Ruslan (eds.), Proceedings of the 5th Discourse Anaphora and Anaphor Resolution Colloquium, 9–14. Lisboa: Edições Colibri.Google Scholar
Bresnan, Joan. 2001. Lexical-Functional Syntax. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Cardinaletti, Anna. 1990. Subject/object asymmetries in German null-topic construcions and the status of specCP. In Mascaró, Joan & Nespor, Marina (eds.), Grammar in Progress, 75–84. Dordrecht: Foris.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Chomsky, Noam. 1977. On wh-movement. In Culicover, Peter W., Wasow, Thomas & Akmajian, Adrian (eds.), Formal Syntax, 71–132. New York: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Chomsky, Noam. 1981. Lectures on Government and Binding. Dordrecht: Foris.Google Scholar
Chomsky, Noam. 1982. Some Concepts and Consequences of the Theory of Government and Binding. Cambridge MA: The MIT Press.Google Scholar
Chomsky, Noam. 2008. On phases. In Freidin, Robert, Otero, Carlos & Zubizarreta, Maria-Luisa (eds.), Foundational Issues in Linguistic Theory, 133–166. Cambridge MA: The MIT Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cooper, Robin. 1986. Swedish and the Head Feature Convention. In Hellan, Lars & Christensen, Kirsti Koch (eds.), Topics in Scandinavian Syntax, 31–52. Dordrecht: Reidel.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Craenenbroeck, Jeroen van & Haegeman, Liliane. 2007. The derivation of subject-initial V2. Linguistic Inquiry 38, 167–178.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Culicover, Peter W. & Jackendoff, Ray. 2005. Simpler Syntax. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dalrymple, Mary. 2001. Lexical Functional Grammar (Syntax & Semantics 34). San Diego, CA: Academic Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dalrymple, Mary & King, Tracy Holloway. 2000. Missing-object constructions: Lexical and constructional variation. In Butt, Miriam & King, Tracy Holloway (eds.), Online Proceedings of the LFG2000 Conference, 82–103. http://cslipublications.stanford.edu/LFG/5/lfg00.pdf.Google Scholar
Eide, Kristin Melum. 2011. Norwegian (non-V2) declaratives, resumptive elements, and the Wackernagel position. Nordic Journal of Linguistics 34, 179–213.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Engdahl, Elisabet. 1982. Restrictions on unbounded dependencies in Swedish. In Engdahl & Ejerhed (eds.), 151–174.Google Scholar
Engdahl, Elisabet. 1983. Parasitic gaps. Linguistics and Philosophy 6, 5–34.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Engdahl, Elisabet. 1997. Relative clause extraction in context. Working Papers in Scandinavian Syntax 60, 59–86.Google Scholar
Engdahl, Elisabet. 2001. The role of syntactic features in the analysis of dialogue. In Rohrer, Christian, Roßdeutscher, Antje & Kamp, Hans (eds.), Linguistics Form and its Computation, 111–142. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications.Google Scholar
Engdahl, Elisabet. 2006. Information packaging in questions. In Bonami, Olivier & Hofherr, Patricia Cabredo (eds.), Empirical Issues in Syntax and Semantics 6, 93–111. Paris. http://www.cssp.cnrs.fr/eiss6/index_en.html.Google Scholar
Engdahl, Elisabet. 2007. Flerfunktionellt det [Multifunctional it]. In Milles, Karin & Vogel, Anna (eds.), Språkets roll och räckvidd (Stockholm Studies in Scandinavian Philology, New Series 42), 97–106. Stockholm: University of Stockholm.Google Scholar
Engdahl, Elisabet. 2010. Vad händer med subjektstvånget? Om det-inledda satser utan subjekt [What is happening to the subject requirement? On subjectless clauses introduced by det]. Språk och Stil 20, 89–104.Google Scholar
Engdahl, Elisabet, Andréasson, Maia & Börjars, Kersti. 2004. Word order in the Swedish midfield – an OT approach. In Karlsson, Fred (ed.), Papers from the 20th Scandinavian Conference of Linguistics (University of Helsinki, Department of General Linguistics, Publications 36), 1–13. http://www.ling.helsinki.fi/kielitiede/20scl/proceedings.shtml.Google Scholar
Engdahl, Elisabet & Ejerhed, Eva (eds.). 1982. Readings on Unbounded Dependencies in Scandinavian Languages. Umeå & Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell International.Google Scholar
Enger, Hans-Olav. 2004. Scandinavian pancake sentences as semantic agreement. Nordic Journal of Linguistics 27, 5–34.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Erteschik-Shir, Nomi. 1982. Extractability in Danish and the Pragmatic Principle of Dominance. In Engdahl & Ejerhed (eds.), 175–191.Google Scholar
Erteschik-Shir, Nomi. 2007. Information Structure: The Syntax–Discourse Interface. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Falk, Cecilia. 1993. Non-Referential Subjects in the History of Swedish. Lund: Department of Scandinavian Languages.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Forsskåhl, Mona. 2009. Konstruktioner i interaktion: de e som resurs i samtal [Constructions in interaction: It is as a conversational resource] (Studier i nordisk filologi 83). Helsingfors: Svenska Litteratursällskapet i Finland.Google Scholar
Frey, Werner. 2004. The grammar–pragmatics interface and the German prefield. Sprache und Pragmatik 52, 1–39.Google Scholar
Gazdar, Gerald. 1981. Unbounded dependencies and coordinate structure. Linguistic Inquiry 12, 155–184.Google Scholar
Ginzburg, Jonathan. 2012. The Interactive Stance: Meaning for Conversation. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hammarberg, Björn. 2000. A polyfunctional word in native usage and L2 acquisition: The Swedish neutral pronoun “det”. In Falk, Johan, Magnusson, Gunnar, Melchers, Gunnel & Nilsson, Barbro (eds.), Kontraster i språk – Contrasts in Languages (Stockholm Studies in Modern Philology 12), 103–129. Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell International.Google Scholar
Hammarberg, Björn. 2008. Konstruktioner som produkt och process – en studie av hur L1- och L2-talare utnyttjar “det är” [Constructions as product and process – a study of how L1 and L2 speakers use ‘it is’]. Nordand 3, 79–107.Google Scholar
Hellberg, Staffan. 2001. Om svenska språkhandlingar [On Swedish speech acts]. In Kungl. Vitterhets Historie och Antikvitets Akademiens Årsbok 2001, 55–64. Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell International.Google Scholar
Hicks, Glyn. 2009. Tough-constructions and their derivations. Linguistic Inquiry 40, 535–566.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hoekstra, Teun. 1983. The distribution of sentential complements. In Bennis, Hans & van Lessen Kloeke, W. U. S. (eds.), Linguistics in the Netherlands 1983, 93–103. Dordrecht: Foris.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Holmberg, Anders & Platzack, Christer. 1995. The Role of Inflection in Scandinavian Syntax. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Josefsson, Gunlög. 2006. Semantic and grammatical genders in Swedish – independent but interacting dimensions. Lingua 116, 1346–1368.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Josefsson, Gunlög. 2009. Peas and pancakes: On apparent disagreement and (null) light verbs in Swedish. Nordic Journal of Linguistics 32, 35–72.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Julien, Marit, 2009. Plus(s) at(t) i skandinaviska – en minimal matris [Plus(s) at(t) in Scandinavian – a minimal matrix]. Språk och stil 19, 124–142.Google Scholar
Källström, Roger. 1993. Kongruens i svenskan [Agreement in Swedish] (Nordistica Gothoburgensia 16). Göteborg: Acta Universitatis Gothoburgensis.Google Scholar
Kathol, Andreas, Przepiórkowski, Adam & Teng, Jesse. 2011. Advanced topics in Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar. In Borsley & Börjars (eds.), 54–111.Google Scholar
Koster, Jan. 1975. Dutch as an SOV Language. Linguistic Analysis 1, 111–136.Google Scholar
Lambrecht, Knud. 1988. There was a farmer had a dog: Syntactic amalgams revisited. Berkeley Linguistics Society (BLS) 14: Parasession on Grammaticalization, 319–339.Google Scholar
Larsson, Ida. To appear. Choice of non-referential subject in existential constructions and with weather-verbs. In Johannesen, Janne Bondi & Vangsnes, Øystein A. (eds.), Nordic Atlas of Language Structure (NALS). Oslo: University of Oslo. www.tekstlab.uio.no/nals. [To be published in 2013.]Google Scholar
Lødrup, Helge. 2011. Lexical-Functiona Grammar: Functional structure. In Borsley & Börjars (eds.), 141–180.Google Scholar
Lundgren, Charlotte. 2009. Samarbete genom samtal [Team talk: Collaboration through communicaion in meetings of a Multiprofessional Pain Rehabilitation Care Team] (Linköping Studies in Arts and Science 483). Linköping: Linköping University.Google Scholar
Malmgren, Sven-Göran. 1990. Adjektiviska funktioner i svenskan [Adjectival functions in Swedish] (Nordistica Gothoburgensia 13). Gothenburg: Acta Universitatis Gothoburgensis.Google Scholar
Marslen-Wilson, William. 1973. Linguistic structure and speech shadowing at very short latencies. Nature 244, 522–523.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Marslen-Wilson, William. 1975. Sentence perception as an interactive parallell process. Science 189, 226–228.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Meinunger, André. 2007. About object es in the German Vorfeld. Linguistic Inquiry 38, 553–563.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Moberg, Vilhelm. 1956. Nybyggarna [The immigrants]. Stockholm: Bonniers.Google Scholar
Mörnsjö, Maria. 2002. V1 declaratives in spoken Swedish. Lund: Institutionen för nordiska språk.Google Scholar
Müller, Stefan & Ørsnes, Bjarne. 2011. Positional expletives in Danish, German and Yiddish. In Müller, Stefan (ed.), Proceedings of the HPSG 2011 Conference, 167–187. http://csli-publications.stanford.edu/.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nanni, Debbie. 1978. The EASY Class of Adjectives in English. Ph.D. thesis, University of Massachusetts at Amherst.Google Scholar
Nanni, Debbie. 1980. On the surface syntax of constructions with easy-type adjectives. Language 56 (3), 568–591.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pickering, Martin J. & Barry, Guy. 1991. Sentence processing without empty categories. Language and Cognitive Processes 6, 229–259.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Platzack, Christer. 1986. The position of the finite verb in Swedish. In Haider, Hubert & Printzhorn, Martin (eds.), Verb Second Phenomena in Germanic Languages, 27–47. Dordrecht: Foris.Google Scholar
Platzack, Christer. 1998. Svenskans inre grammatik – det minimalistiska programmet [The internal grammar of Swedish: The Minimalist Program]. Lund: Studentlitteratur.Google Scholar
Platzack, Christer. 2011 Den fantastiska grammatiken. En minimalistisk beskrivning av svenskan [The fantastic grammar: A Minimalist account of Swedish]. Stockholm: Norstedts.Google Scholar
Platzack, Christer. 2012a. Backward Binding and the C-T Phase: A case of syntactic haplology. In Brugé, Laura, Cardinaletti, Anna, Giusti, Giuliana, Munaro, Nicola & Poletto, Cecilia (eds.), Functional Heads: The Cartography of Syntactic Structures, vol. 7, 197–207. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Platzack, Christer. 2012b. Split topicalization in Swedish and doubling with det ‘it.neuter’. In Brandtler, Johan, Håkansson, David, Huber, Stefan & Klingvall, Eva (eds.), Discourse & Grammar: A Festschrift in Honor of Valéria Molnár, 411–431. Lund: Centre for Languages and Literature, Lund University.Google Scholar
Platzack, Christer. In press. Spurious topic drop in Swedish. Lohndal, In Terje (ed.), In Search of Universal Grammar: From Old Norse to Zoque, 27–50. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. [To be published in 2013.]Google Scholar
Pollard, Carl & Sag, Ivan A.. 1994. Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Rezac, Milan. 2006. On tough movement. In Boeckx (ed.), 288–325.Google Scholar
Richards, Marc & Biberauer, Theresa. 2005. Explaining Expl. In Dikken, Marcel den & Tortora, Christina (eds.), The Function of Function Words and Functional Categories, 115–154. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Roberts, John. 1999. Presenteringssyntax [Syntax of presentational constructions]. B.A. thesis, Gothenburg University, Department of Swedish.Google Scholar
Roll, Mikael. 2009. The Neurophysiology of Grammatical Constraints: ERP Studies on the Influence of Prosody and Pragmatics on the Processing of Syntax and Morphology in Swedish. Lund: Språk- och litteraturcentrum.Google Scholar
Rosenkvist, Henrik. 2010. Null referential subjects in Övdalian. Nordic Journal of Linguistics 33, 231–267.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ross, John R. 1982. Pronoun deleting processes in German. Presented at the Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America, San Diego, CA.Google Scholar
Saaristo, Pekka. 2008. Regional variation och interaktion: om en responsiv konstruktion i Helsingforssvenska. In Lindström, Jan (ed.), Språk och interaktion 1 (Nordica Helsingiensia 10), 25–81. Helsingfors: Nordica.Google Scholar
Sag, Ivan A., Thomas Wasow & Emily Bender. 2003. Syntactic Theory: A Formal Introduction, 2nd edn.Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications.Google Scholar
Sigurðsson, Halldór Á. 2010. On EPP effects. Studia Linguistica 64, 159–189.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sigurðsson, Halldór Á. 2011. Conditions on argument drop. Linguistic Inquiry 42, 67–104.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sigurðsson, Halldór Á. & Maling, Joan. 2010. The Empty Left Edge Condition. In Putnam, Michael T. (ed.), Exploring Crash-Proof Grammars, 57–84. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Søfteland, Åshild. To appear. De e de som e. Om utbrytingskonstruksjonen i norsk. Eit studium av subjektssyntaks og -pragmatikk i spontantale [It is it that is: On the cleft construction in Norwegian. A study of subject syntax and pragmatics in spontaneous talk]. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Oslo.Google Scholar
Sundman, Marketta. 1980. Existentialkonstruktionen i svenskan [The existential construction in Swedish] (Meddelanden från Stiftelsens för Åbo akademi forskningsinstitut 57). Åbo.Google Scholar
Svenonius, Peter. 2002. Introduction. In Svenonius, Peter (ed.), Subjects, Expletives and the EPP, 1–25. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Teleman, Ulf, Hellberg, Staffan & Andersson, Erik. 1999. Svenska Akademiens Grammatik [The Swedish Academy grammar], 4 vols. Stockholm: Norstedts.Google Scholar
Theiler, Nadine & Bouma, Gerlof. To appear. Two for the price of one: An LFG treatment of sentence initial object es in German. In Butt, Miriam & King, Tracy Holloway (eds.), Online Proceedings of the LFG2012 Conference. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications. http://cslipublications.stanford.edu/LFG/.Google Scholar
Thráinsson, Höskuldur. 1996. On the non-universality of functional categories. In Abraham, Werner, Epstein, Samuel David, Thráinsson, Höskuldur & Zwart, Jan-Wouter (eds.), Minimal Ideas: Syntactic Studies in the Minimalist Framework, 253–281. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Thráinsson, Höskuldur. 2007. The Syntax of Icelandic. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Travis, Lisa. 1984. Parameters and Effects of Word Order Variation. Ph.D. dissertation, MIT. dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/15211.Google Scholar
Vallduví, Enric & Engdahl, Elisabet. 1996. The linguistic realization of information packaging. Linguistics 34, 459–519.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Vikner, Sten. 1990. Verb Movement and the Licensing of NP-Positions in the Germanic Languages. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Geneva.Google Scholar
Vikner, Sten. 1995. Verb Movement and Expletive Subjects in the Germanic Languages. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar