Proceedings of LFG08

This paper presents results from a corpus investigation of written Swedish and Danish. The results show that pronominal objects with clausal or VP antecedents appear relatively more seldom before sentence adverbials, i.e. are more seldom shifted, than referents with NP antecedents. I argue that this is due to a difference in cognitive status (cf. Gundel, Hedberg & Zacharski 1993), where pronouns with clausal or VP antecedents that appear in +FACTIVE environments and pronouns with NP antecedents are easier to process, which licenses object shift as well as an unstressed pronunciation. Pronominal objects with clausal or VP antecedents in –FACTIVE environments are harder to process and appear after sentence adverbials. For the LFG architecture the relation between cognitive status and information packaging gives rise to the need for a more fine grained value of the i-structure ACTVN feature introduced by O’Connor (2006). The paper also raises the question on whether research about the underlying mechanisms of object shift should be limited to two syntactic positions, i.e. object placement in relation to the sentence adverbial. Preliminary results show that the initial position in V2 clauses also need be investigated. 1 What is pronominal object shift? The Scandinavian languages are similar in many respects. Their mutual history has resulted in the lexicon and the syntactic structures being very similar. These similarities provide an environment where the study of the differences come to resemble a laboratory situation, and the variation can be studied in the backdrop of the major part of the grammatical system being constant. This paper deals with one of these small syntactic differences, namely pronominal object shift. Object shift is a phenomenon that has attracted the interest of many linguists over the years and it is consequently well described in the literature, just a few examples are: Holmberg (1986, 1999), Hellan & Platzack (1995), Josefsson (1992; 2003), Sells (2001), Svenonius (2002) and Vikner (1994, 1997). Holmberg’s generalization (Holmberg 1986; 1999) says that pronominal objects in the Scandinavian languages normally appear before sentence adverbials, see example (1a) where honom/ham appear before the sentential negation inte/ikke. This position will be called shifted throughout this paper. It is only possible for a pronominal object to appear in the shifted position when the lexical verb is in the V2 position, see the ungrammatical (1b) where the lexical verb sett/sedt is in VP. (1) a. Agnes Agnes Agnes såg så see-PST honom ham him inte. ikke. not [SW] [DA] ‘Agnes didn’t see him.’ † I thank the audience of LFG08 at the University of Sydney, in particular George Aaron Broadwell, the colleagues at the University of Aarhus and at the NORMS Grand Meeting, Kersti Börjars and Elisabet Engdahl for helpful comments.