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Relative inversion and non-verb-initial imperatives in Early Modern Swedish

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 June 2013

Erik Magnusson Petzell
Erik Magnusson Petzell*
Affiliation:
Erik Magnusson Petzell, Institute for Language and Folklore, the Department for Dialectology, Onomastics and Folklore Research in Gothenburg, Vallgatan 22, SE-411 16 Gothenburg, Sweden. erik.petzell@sofi.se
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Abstract

This article deals with two syntactic differences between Present-Day Swedish (PDSw) and Early Modern Swedish (EMSw): first, only EMSw allows VS and XVS word order to occur in relative clauses; second, only EMSw permits non-verb-initial imperatives. One structural difference between the varieties is assumed to be a prerequisite for all these word order differences: the subject position was spec-TP in EMSw but is spec-FinP in PDSw. Only the lower position (spec-TP) is compatible with inversion (VS) and fronting of non-subjects (XVS) in relative clauses as well as with imperative clauses having elements other than the imperative verb in the initial position. To be able to account for the latter phenomenon, however, an additional assumption is needed: the imperative type-feature, [imp], always accompanies the verb in PDSw but is tied to an operator in EMSw. The first assumption about differing subject positions is independently motivated by findings already in the previous literature. The second assumption about the differing behaviour of [imp] in the two varieties is supported by the distribution of imperative verbs over a wider range of syntactic contexts in EMSw than in PDSw.

Keywords

Early modern Swedishgenerative syntaximperativesrelative clausessubject positionssubject–verb inversiontopicalisationverb-secondword order
Type
Research Article
Information
Nordic Journal of Linguistics , Volume 36 , Issue 1 , May 2013 , pp. 27 - 55
Copyright
Copyright © Nordic Association of Linguistics 2013 

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References

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