Íslenskt mál og almenn málfræði - 2020, Blaðsíða 123

elisabet engdahl, halldór ármann sigurðsson,
annie zaenen and joan maling
Thematic constraints on presentational sentences
in Icelandic and Swedish
1. Introduction
Word order in the Scandinavian languages has received a lot of attention
in the last forty years or so, see e.g. Thráinsson (1979, 2007), Holmberg
and Platzack (1995), Maling and Zaenen (1990) and Vikner (1995).1 In
this article we focus on presentational sentences in Icelandic and Swedish
with the aim of comparing how thematic roles and clause structure inter-
act in these languages. By presentational sentences we mean sentences
that assert, or deny, the existence of a referent or present a hitherto
unmentioned referent in a situation.2 Presentational sentences typically
have an expletive early in the sentence and an indefinite DP later. We will
refer to this indefinite DP as the pivot.3 One Icelandic and one Swedish
example, taken from Platzack (1983), are shown in (1) and (2).4
Íslenskt mál 41–42 (2019–2020), 123–165. © 2020 Íslenska málfræðifélagið, Reykjavík.
1 This is a revised and extended version of Engdahl, Maling, Sigurðsson and Zaenen
(2018). We are grateful to the audiences at Grammar in Focus, February 2018 in Lund, the
11th Nordic Dialectologist conference, August 2018 in Reykjavík and the Grammar Seminar
in Lund in February 2019 for comments and suggestions, especially to Lars-Olof Delsing,
Cecilia Falk, Gunlög Josefsson, David Petersson, Jóhannes Gísli Jónsson and Øystein
Vangsnes. We thank Einar Freyr Sigurðsson, Höskuldur Thráinsson, Sigríður Magn úsdóttir
and Sigríður Sigurjónsdóttir for help with the Icelandic data and Peter Andersson, Maia
Andréasson, Kristian Blensenius, Linnéa Bäckström, Benjamin Lyngfelt, Erik Petzell and
Henrik Rosenkvist for help with the Swedish data. In addition to native speakers’ judgments
we have searched in the large text corpora Risamálheildin (2019) and Korp for relevant data.
This version has benefitted significantly from comments by two anonymous reviewers and
from the detailed comments and editorial suggestions made by Einar Freyr Sigurðsson.
2 Other terms for presentational sentences are existential sentences and there-insertion
constructions, see e.g. Milsark (1974) and Sundman (1980).
3 In the examples, pivots are shown in bold. Other English terms for pivots are logical sub-
ject and associate (of the expletive). In Swedish, e.g. Teleman et al. (1999), they are called egentligt
subjekt ‘real subject’. A similar term eiginlegt frumlag is used in Icelandic whereas the
Norwegian reference grammar, Faarlund et al. (1997), uses the term potensielt subjekt ‘potential
subject’. The extent to which pivots have subject properties is discussed in Zaenen et al. (2017).
4 The following abbreviations are used: acc = accusative, agt = Agent, dat = dative,