object shift – andréasson

In short

This project investigates the information dynamical aspects of pronominal object shift in the Mainland Scandinavian languages with special focus on a comparative study of Danish and Swedish.

One focus of the study is to uncover the underlying causes of the different shifting properties of pronominal objects with a propositional antecedent and pronominal objects with a referential antecedent.

The first phase of the project spans from Spetember 1st, 2007 to September 30th, 2008. During this period, I have been stationed at the University of Aarhus, Denmark, within the NORMS project. From October 2008, I am at the department of Swedish at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, a four year employment as junior researcher, funded by Vetenskapsrådet, the Swedish Research Council.

/Maia Andréasson

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Object shift in Swedish and Danish

The Scandinavian languages are similar in many respects. Their mutual history has resulted in that lexicon and syntactic structures are much alike. These similarities provide an environment where the study of the differences come to resemble a laboratory situation, and the variation can be studied in view of the major part of the grammatical system being constant. The proposed study aims to investigate the information dynamical aspects of pronominal object shift in mainland Scandinavian languages with special focus on a comparative study of Danish and Swedish. The sentence in (1) below, is an example with the pronominal object shifted, i.e. before the negation. In (2) the noun, Philippe, appears after the negation and is hence non-shifted.

(1)

Agnes såg honom inte. (Da: Agnes så ham ikke)

Agnes saw him not

’Agnes didn’t see him’

(2)

Agnes såg inte Philippe (Da: Agnes så ikke Philippe)

Agnes saw not Philippe

’Agnes didn’t see Philippe’

Pronominal object shift has been the subject of great interest in Germanic and general linguistics. It has been argued that object shift of non-contrasted pronominal objects is obligatory in Danish, but optional in Swedish.

Despite this, there are Danish examples where weak pronouns with propositional antecedents (referring to a clause/verb phrase) appear after a negation (e.g. det in Jeg ved ikke det). These Danish examples have been briefly mentioned as possible counter examples in the literature (cf. Basbøll 1986, cited in Josefsson 2003), but their individual character as propositional has not been investigated or discussed as such. It is apparently in southern Danish dialects that this is possible according to Pedersen (1993). In her account there are also examples with referential pronouns after sentence adverbials.

In Swedish, like in the above mentioned southern Danish dialects, also weak pronominal objects with referential antecedents (i.e. referring to an entity, as honom/ham above) may appear unshifted. Here, results from the corpus study in my dissertation, concerning a small amount of pronominal objects, show a difference in distribution between referential objects and those representing a proposition, and also a distinct difference in interpretation for shifted and non-shifted pronouns of these categories.

Most of the previous work has relied on speakers' judgements of made-up examples. This study aims to uncover underlying causes of the different shifting properties of the above categories in an extensive corpus study. This has, to my knowledge, never been subject to thorough investigation and the preliminary results mentioned above point to intriguing differences that may not be possible to reveal by mere introspection.

The study will nevertheless consist of two major parts. First, I will perform an extensive corpus study that will result in a broad investigation of object shift in Danish and Swedish written and spoken language. This has not been done before and will be of value to the basic research of word order in the Nordic countries. In addition to this I will elicit speaker judgements from native speakers of Danish and Swedish on examples with object shift from the corpus study.

Preliminary results, September 2008 (Andréasson to appear), show that accessibility (cf. the givenness hierarchy of Gundel, Hedberg & Zacharski 1993) plays a role for object placement. Complements of –FACTIVE predicates seems to be harder to process than other objects and appear in situ to a greater extent than other pronominal objects (cf. Gundel, Borthen &Fretheim 1999; Hegarty 2003 and other papers of the same authors). It is also of vital interest to take into account not only the shifted and the in situ position, but to investigate which pronominal objects that appear in the initial position in V2 clauses.

The project as described above will span a period of 24 months. The first six months will be devoted to background research, getting access to relevant written and spoken corpora. I will also perform pilot studies for the corpus investigation and for the design and search for reference groups for a spoken questionnaire. The following twelwe months will comprise the corpus investigation and the questionnaire investigation. The last six months will be devoted to analysis of the material and presenting the results at workshops and writing a series of articles.