Presentational sentences in Icelandic and Swedish: Roles and positions

• In this article we report on a systematic comparison of presentational sentences in Icelandic and Swedish, looking in particular at possible thematic roles of the pivot and how they correlate with positional options. Despite some well-known differences between the languages (only Icelandic allows ‘high’ IP-pivots and pivots with transitive verbs), it turns out that the restrictions on VP-pivots are similar, both in terms of roles and positions. VP-pivots have to be Themes and may co-occur with other DPs, but only if the pivot is the last DP argument. We show how these restrictions to some extent reflect the argument structure proposed in Platzack (2010). In addition we show that we need to distinguish presentational sentences among the different Transitive Expletive Constructions discussed in Håkansson (2017).

Ämnesord

HUMANIORA  -- Språk och litteratur -- Jämförande språkvetenskap och allmän lingvistik (hsv//swe)

HUMANITIES  -- Languages and Literature -- General Language Studies and Linguistics (hsv//eng)

HUMANIORA  -- Språk och litteratur -- Studier av enskilda språk (hsv//swe)

HUMANITIES  -- Languages and Literature -- Specific Languages (hsv//eng)

Nyckelord

Icelandic

Swedish

Scandinavian syntas

existential

presentational

theta roles

argument structure

Publikations- och innehållstyp

vet (ämneskategori)

art (ämneskategori)