Subject omission and discourse anchorage in early Swedish child language

This paper addresses the question whether a connection exists between subject omission and discourse anchorage in early Swedish child language. By analysing data from three Swedish children, I investigate whether previous mentioning in the discourse affects the occurrence of subject omission. A Danish study by Hamann & Plunkett (1998) reported that no connection between subject omissions and discourse anchorage could be established for Danish. My study partly contradicts their results: in finite utterances, the majority of the omissions found were anchored to the discourse. Furthermore, the results indicate that the development of a Theory of Mind might be of importance for the decrease of subject omission in child language

Why we should ever bother about wh-questions: on NPI-licensing properties of wh-questions in Swedish

This paper is an attempt to solve the somewhat elusive polarity item licensing properties of wh-questions in Swedish. As has been observed by Klima (1964) for English, NPIs are gener¬ally not compatible with genuinely information seeking wh-questions, but tend to induce rhe¬torical interpretations. Distin-guishing between three types of wh-questions and the kind of information they request, I will systematically review the syntactic, semantic and pragmatic properties of each wh-type. Based on that overview, I argue that NPI-licensing in wh-ques¬tions is dependent on the relation between the implication of exis-tence associated with the wh-word and the presupposition induced by the expressed proposition. According to my analysis, wh-words should not be regarded as NPI-licensing operators. Being place-holders, wh-words inherit whatever properties are associated with the item they replace. The licensing property of the wh-word is thus dependent on the licensing property of the referent. Thus, only wh-words referring to downward entailing expressions will license NPIs in their scope (e.g. when pointing to an empty set). Such wh-questions tend to be interpreted rhetorically

On Aristotle and Baldness: topic, reference, presupposition of existence, and negation

This paper is a contribution to the never settled debate on reference, negation and presupposition of existence in the linguistic/philosophical literature. Based on Swedish and English data, the discussion is an attempt to present a unified account of the opposing views put forward in the works of Aristotle, Frege (1892), Russell (1905) and Strawson (1950). The starting point is the observed asymmetry in Swedish (and English) that negation may precede a quantified subject NP in the first position, but not a definite subject NP or a proper name. This asymmetry is argued to be due to semantic, rather than syntactic, restrictions. In the model proposed here, negating a topic NP affects the “topic selection”. This is allowed with quantified NPs, since negating a quantifier leads only to a modification of the topic selection. For definite/generic subject NPs this cannot be allowed, since negating a definite NP equals cancelling the topic selection. This leads to a ‘crash’ at the semantic level

Evaluability: an alternative approach to polarity sensitivity

Based on Brandtler (2012), this paper argues that polarity items are sensitive to evaluability, a concept that refers to the possibility of accepting or rejecting an utterance as true in a communicative exchange. The main distinction is made between evaluable and non-evaluable utterances. The evaluable category comprises any clause that asserts, presupposes or entails the truth of an affirmative or a negative proposition. In contrast, the non-evaluable category contains clauses that do not assert, presuppose or entail the truth of an affirmative or a negative proposition. According to the Evaluability Hypothesis, non-evaluable environments are natural hosts for both NPIs and PPIs. Hence, the occurrence of polarity items in non-evaluable clauses does not require formal licensing, and this is the reason we find both PPIs and weak NPIs in yes/no-questions and conditionals. Evaluable clauses, in contrast, are restricted environments and may only host polarity items that are formally (i.e. syntactically) licensed. Hence, NPIs require the presence of a licensing element, and PPIs require the absence of such elements. This analysis leads to an important change of perspective, as the occurrence of polarity items in negative and affirmative sentences becomes the marked, or exceptional, case

The evaluability hypothesis: the syntax and semantics of polarity licensing in Swedish

This dissertation is concerned with the empirical and theoretical aspects of polarity item licensing in Swedish. I argue that polarity items are semantically sensitive to evaluability, a concept that refers to the possibility of accepting or rejecting a clause as true in a communicative exchange. Clauses are either evaluable or non-evaluable. According to the present hypothesis, non-evaluable clauses constitute natural environments for polarity items, and may host polarity items without any kind of formal (syntactic) licensing. Evaluable clauses, in contrast, are restricted environments, and may only host formally licensed polarity items. Under this proposal, the occurrence of polarity items in such non-evaluable environments as yes/no-questions and conditionals is regarded as the prototypical case, while the occurrence of polarity items in (evaluable) affirmative and negative sentences is the marked, or exceptional, case. It is further argued that evaluability is mirrored syntactically in the left-periphery of the Swedish clause: evaluable clauses have Spec-CP, while non-evaluable clauses lack Spec-CP. I propose that this observation can be accounted for within a Minimalist framework by assuming a fixed (but arbitrary) connection between evaluability and the edge-feature in C (Chomsky 2008). The focus on Spec-CP distinguishes the present work from most minimalist accounts of Swedish clause structure, which tend to be primarily concerned with verb movement to C. All in all, the Evaluability hypothesis should be regarded as an alternative to previous theories of polarity item licensing put forward in the literature. It incorporates the insights of Ladusaw’s (1979, 1980) downward entailing hypothesis, but restricts its applicability to evaluable clauses. Furthermore, a revised version of Linebarger’s (1980) Immediate Scope Constraint is argued to be fully compatible with the present hypothesis. However, the Evaluability Hypothesis challenges the widely acknowledged Veridicality Hypothesis (Zwarts 1993 and Giannakidou 1998), since it is shown that the distribution of polarity items in Swedish is better accounted for in terms of evaluability than veridicality

Negative V3-declaratives in Finland Swedish

This article is concerned with negative V3-declaratives in the Swedish dialects of Finland. We argue that this peculiar word order is a consequence of syntactic reanalysis: the negative marker has changed from syntactic phrase to syntactic head. Though the negative marker in the standard varieties of Swedish has all the characteristics of a syntactic phrase, the data strongly support a head analysis of the negative marker in some of the Finland Swedish dialects: negation is phonetically reduced, may cliticize to the finite verb, and can combine with other negative elements to yield negative concord. The proposed development of the negative element is in line with the general direction of Jespersen’s (1917) cycle, as proposed also by van Gelderen (2008). Furthermore, our data reveal that negative V3-declaratives are less syntactically restricted and have a wider geographical distribution than has hitherto been assumed in the literature

Negative V3-declaratives in Finland Swedish

This article is concerned with negative V3-declaratives in the Swedish dialects of Finland. We argue that this peculiar word order is a consequence of syntactic reanalysis: the negative marker has changed from syntactic phrase to syntactic head. Though the negative marker in the standard varieties of Swedish has all the characteristics of a syntactic phrase, the data strongly support a head analysis of the negative marker in some of the Finland Swedish dialects: negation is phonetically reduced, may cliticize to the finite verb, and can combine with other negative elements to yield negative concord. The proposed development of the negative element is in line with the general direction of Jespersen’s (1917) cycle, as proposed also by van Gelderen (2008). Furthermore, our data reveal that negative V3-declaratives are less syntactically restricted and have a wider geographical distribution than has hitherto been assumed in the literature

Vi bara testade en hypotes... Ännu mer om preverbala adverbial i svenska

Denna artikel kartlägger och problematiserar förekomsten av preverbala adverbial i svenska, dvs. adverbial placerade före det finita verbet i huvudsatser. Resultatet av en större korpusundersökning visar att de adverbial som kan placeras preverbalt är betydligt fler än vad som tidigare antagits, även om olika adverbial förekommer med olika frekvens i materialet. Vidare argumenteras för att ingen av de analyser som tidigare presenterats om fenomenet helt lyckas fånga det relativt kom­plexa samspel mellan syntax, semantik, pragmatik och prosodi som möjliggör preverbal placering av adverbial. De preverbala adverbialen delas in i två distinkta grupper: i) fokuserande, syntaktisk osjälvständiga ledadverbial och ii) kontrastiva, syntaktiskt självständiga adverbial som kan fungera som led- eller satsadverbial. Den första gruppen innehåller färre men mer frekvent förekommande adverbial än den andra. Artikeln väcker därmed en rad frågor om vad som begränsar och möjliggör preverbal placering av adverbial