Elisabet Engdahl - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Uploads

Papers by Elisabet Engdahl

The Journal of Comparative Germanic Linguistics

Preposed pronouns have a dual role of both connecting the utterance to the context and serving as... more Preposed pronouns have a dual role of both connecting the utterance to the context and serving as its starting point. While central to understanding restrictions on syntactic movement to the left periphery, this type of fronting has often been overlooked. We provide an analysis of the pragmatics and syntax of Swedish pronoun preposing based on a study of spontaneously produced spoken language from the Nordic Dialect Corpus. We find that there is a strong preference for preposing pronouns that function as switch topics and that it is also possible to prepose continued topics, but in neither case is the preposing obligatory. We argue that these sentence-external relations of the topic are not encoded in the syntax of the left periphery in Swedish, but reflect pragmatic strategies for discourse progression. The types of topic (switch or continued) are furthermore shown not to correlate with the prosodic realization of the pronoun. A key feature of our analysis is that we distinguish th...

Nordic Journal of Linguistics

This article gives an overview of the use of non-local passives in mainland Scandinavian, i.e. pa... more This article gives an overview of the use of non-local passives in mainland Scandinavian, i.e. passives where the subject of the first verb is a thematic argument of a second verb. Three factors are important: whether V1 is a control verb or a raising passive, whether V2 is a passive participle or an infinitive and whether the passive is morphological or periphrastic. Danish and Norwegian allow passive control verbs such as forsøge ‘try’ with passive participles whereas this pattern is only found with semi-control verbs like begära ‘request’ in Swedish. In Swedish there is an alternative strategy for strict control verbs, viz. active control verb plus passive infinitive. All three languages allow both passive infinitival complements and passive participles with raising passives such as påstås ‘is claimed’. These passive constructions need to be distinguished from so called long passives and double passives where a passive feature on either V1 or V2 can spread to the adjacent verb.

Languages

It has been noted that examples with extractions out of relative clauses that have been attested ... more It has been noted that examples with extractions out of relative clauses that have been attested in Danish, Norwegian and Swedish are judged to be unacceptable in Icelandic and Faroese. We hypothesize that this may reflect whether or not speakers tend to prepose unstressed object pronouns as a way of establishing a coherent discourse. In this article we investigate to what extent pronoun preposing is used in Swedish, Icelandic and Faroese and whether there is any correlation with the acceptabilty of extractions from relative clauses. We show that Icelandic speakers use pronoun preposing to a very limited extent whereas Faroese speakers often prepose the VP or sentential anaphor tað. In both languages extraction from relative clauses is mainly judged to be unacceptable, with Faroese speakers being somewhat more accepting of extraction from presentational relatives. A crucial factor seems to be whether preposing is associated with a marked, contrastive interpretation or not.

Bergen Language and Linguistics Studies, 2017

We review the various non-canonical positions in which the thematically highest argument can occu... more We review the various non-canonical positions in which the thematically highest argument can occur in Icelandic and in Swedish. We show that NPs in these non-canonical positions have subject properties in both languages. We summarize the restrictions that we are aware of holding on the various positions and discuss whether they are configurational or thematic/semantic in nature.

Detta NLT-nummer innehaller sju artiklar som bygger pa presentationer vid den forsta Grammatik i ... more Detta NLT-nummer innehaller sju artiklar som bygger pa presentationer vid den forsta Grammatik i Norden-konferensen (GRAMINO), som holls i Goteborg den 10–11 maj 2016. Konferensen ar en fortsattning pa ScanDiaSyn/NORMS-samarbetet (se nedan), och den ar tankt att fungera som ett forum for grammatikforskare som studerar de nordiska spraken och dialekterna. I denna inledning ger vi forst en bakgrund till GRAMINO-konferensen, och darefter presenterar vi de sju bidragen i korthet.

With the publication of this book, Jan Terje Faarlund, professor emeritus of Scandinavian Linguis... more With the publication of this book, Jan Terje Faarlund, professor emeritus of Scandinavian Linguistics at the University of Oslo, makes a comparative overview of Danish, Norwegian and Swedish available to linguists who are unable to read these languages. I believe this is the first book of its kind. To find a similar attempt we have to go back to the 1940s when Lage Hulthen published his comprehensive comparison of the syntax of Nordic languages, see Hulthen (1944, 1947). Hulthen’s study is however written in Swedish and is based on written sources mainly from the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th. The main sources for Faarlund’s book are the three reference grammars published in Norwegian, Swedish and Danish between 1997 and 2011: Norsk referansegrammatikk (Faarlund, Lie & Vannebo, 1997, abbreviated NRG), Svenska Akademiens grammatik (Teleman, Hellberg & Andersson 1999, abbreviated SAG) and Grammatik over det Danske Sprog (Hansen & Heltoft 2011, abbreviated GDS)....

In this article we report on a corpus study of elative superlatives in contemporary Swedish. Elat... more In this article we report on a corpus study of elative superlatives in contemporary Swedish. Elative superlatives differ from ordinary superlatives in that no direct comparison with other referents ...

In this article we report on a systematic comparison of presentational sentencesin Icelandic and ... more 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 similar, both in terms of roles and positions.VP-pivots have to be Themes and may co-occur with other DPs, but onlyif the pivot is the last DP argument. We show how these restrictions to someextent reflect the argument structure proposed in Platzack (2010). In additionwe show that we need to distinguish presentational sentences among thedifferent Transitive Expletive Constructions discussed in Hakansson (2017). (Less)

Vi undersoker med hjalp av korpusstudier hur opersonlig passiv anvands i de fastlandsskandinavisk... more Vi undersoker med hjalp av korpusstudier hur opersonlig passiv anvands i de fastlandsskandinaviska spraken. Danska och norska anvander bade perifrastisk bli(ve)-passiv och morfologisk s-passiv, ungefar i samma utstrackning, medan bli-passiv ar mycket ovanlig i svenska, dar den bara anvands i specifika konstruktioner. Resultaten relateras till de parametrar angaende kongruens och ordfoljd som Holmberg (2002) foreslar. Vi finner att Holmbergs parametervarden stammer nagorlunda bra for bokmal, dar ordfoljden particip direkt objekt (PCP DO) ar helt dominerande, medan danska dialekter aven tillater ordfoljden DO PCP. Enligt Holmbergs analys borde svenska och nynorska uppvisa stora likheter, men vi finner att de skiljer sig betraffande ordfoljd. I svenska dominerar ordningen DO PCP medan den omarkerade ordningen i nynorska ar PCP DO, precis som i bokmal.

Linguistics, 2000

Abstract In this paper, two interesting predictions concerning the nature of parasitic gaps made ... more Abstract In this paper, two interesting predictions concerning the nature of parasitic gaps made by Chomsky (1982) are investigated. Although the exact predictions are not borne out in Scandinavian languages, the results in each case confirm Chomsky&#x27;s claim that there ...

The Nordic languages and modern linguistics: …, 1980