On the Relative Order of IP-adverbials (original) (raw)

Verbal particles and results in Swedish and English

2002

This paper examines the interaction between word order and resultative predication in Swedish and English. The paper is structured as follows. Section 2 discusses resultative predication. Section 3 introduces some new data concerning verbal particles and results in Swedish and English. Sections 4 and 5 present the structural representation of Swedish and English verbal particles. Finally, section 6 formalizes the analysis of resultative particles in Lexical- Functional Grammar (LFG; Kaplan and Bresnan 1982; Dalrymple et al. 1995; Bresnan 2001).

A Definite Problem: The Morphosyntax of Double Definiteness in Swedish

Morphology at Santa Cruz: Papers in Honor of Jorge Hankamer, 2011

Swedish is well known for the fact that it appears to show two reflexes of definiteness in its definite nominals. The language makes use of a definite article at the beginning of the nominal and a definite suffix on the head noun. There have been a number of approaches to dealing with the distribution of these elements. Some claim that there is but one determiner in the DP structure, but these do not permit an account of how semantic features influence the independent use of the article and the suffix. Other theories posit more functional material in the nominal, but these do not provide a satisfactory syntactic account for the distribution. The theory I develop here takes the most satisfying elements of each of these kinds of theories and unifies them to provide an approach that can account for the semantic facts and provide a more theoretically sound syntax.

From nominal quantifiers to adverbial modifiers: A corpus investigation with reference to Swedish

Skandinavskaya Filologiya 21(2), 2023

As has been noted in grammaticalization literature, partitives, i. e. nominals encoding parts, portions, and sets, tend to evolve into vague quantifiers, and then into degree adverbs. However, while this grammaticalization path has already received a fair amount of scholarly attention in English, the extension of such items beyond the nominal domain in Swedish remains an empirically unexplored territory. Thus, based on random samples of attestations extracted from selected Språkbanken corpora, this paper offers a synchronic glimpse into the syntactic expansion of nine Swedish nominal quantifiers, namely droppe ‘drop’, nypa ‘pinch’, smula ‘crumb’, hop ‘heap’, hopar ‘heaps’, hög ‘pile’, högar ‘piles’, massa ‘mass’, and massor ‘masses’. The Swedish results largely coincide with those obtained for English, and demonstrate that in the verbal domain, most of the scrutinized elements reveal a preference for pronominal uses, in which they function as an argument of the verb rather than a genuine degree adverb, but which nonetheless give rise to secondary scalar inferences, whereas in the adjectival domain, a majority of the items exhibit a propensity to combine with the comparative forms of adjectives/adverbs. Both of these environments may therefore be assumed to constitute bridging contexts in the emergence of full-blown degree modifier uses of grammaticalized partitives. It is further shown that there exists a strong positive correlation between the items’ respective degrees of grammaticalization in the quantifier function and their extents of adverbialization, which testifies to the importance of frequency of use in the scrutinized instance of grammaticalization.

Grammaticalization of (in)definiteness in Swedish

Modern Swedish is an article language which in the course of its history has developed both definite and indefinite articles. The present study focuses on the grammaticalization of the postposed definite -IN, etymologically the demonstrative pronoun hinn ‘yon’ and the indefinite EN, whose source is the numeral ‘one’. Both grammaticalizations originate with textual uses of the forms: the demonstrative to mark anaphora and the numeral to mark new, persistent referents. The processes are interdependent: the indefinite article does not grammaticalize before the grammaticalization of the definite has been triggered and its development restricts the spread of the definite article to specific uses. Since both grammaticalizations have the same sources in unrelated article languages, this detailed study of the developments in Swedish has a bearing on the studies of other languages as well.

The relative order of sentential adverbs in Icelandic and Faroese

Fróðskaparrit, 2021

This paper discusses the relative order of four types of sentential adverbs in Insular Scandinavian. Data from two judgment tasks show that the relative orders of adverbs that follow Cinque's (1999) hierarchy receive more positive judgments than orders that violate this hierarchy in both languages, but the contrasts are much weaker than expected. That Icelandic and Faroese behave in very similar ways with respect to adverb placement is expected, given all the syntactic similarities between the two languages.

Invited tutorial on Norwegian grammar

Proceedings of the International Conference on Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar

This presentation is essentially a "guided tour of interesting sites" of the Norwegian language: passive, presentational constructions, anaphora and V2 patterns. The data is related to issues concerning Argument Structure and whether the analysis of root clauses in Norwegian should include a node "C" hosting the finite verb. The paper points to areas of Norwegian grammar which constitutes possible challenges to central proposals made in the HPSG literature, but, in addition, it sketches possible analyses within the HPSG framework.