The syntax and semantics of questions in Swedish

The Syntax and Semantics of Questions in Swedish September 1980 Elisabet Engdahl , M.A,, University of Uppsala Ph.D., University of Massachusetts Directed by: Professor Barbara H. Partee This dissertation provides an explicit syntactic and semantic account for a reasonably large sample of question constructions in Swedish. Within generative grammar, the existence of non-local dependencies as in constituent questions has been taken as evidence for the need to postulate transformational rules in the grammar of natural languages. Recently a number of linguists have proposed ways of handling such dependencies without transformations. Until now, these proposals have been based on English. In this study, we investigate the possibility of extending non-transformational approaches to languages like Swedish where question formation differs from English in a significant way. In Swedish, more than one constituent can be extracted from a clause. We discuss the consequences of this fact for transformational and non-transformational approaches to Swedish. It is shown that the non-transformational approaches need to be substantially modified in order to provide a syntactically and semantical ly adequate grammar for Swedish. The implications of these modifications are assessed from the point of view of choosing between grammars. The main part of the dissertation consists of an analysis of