Íslenskt mál og almenn málfræði - 2020, Blaðsíða 126

DPs which may appear as IP-pivots in Icelandic).6 We note that presen-
tational sentences are very sensitive to context. They tend to require loca-
tive or temporal anchors and are often better with modal or inferential
particles. Nevertheless we sometimes use simple constructed examples to
bring out a distinction, for ease of comparison.
2.1 The standard account
Platzack (1983) accounted for both these differences, that is that only
Icelandic allows IP-pivots and transitive verbs, by assuming that the
expletives are generated in different positions in the two languages. The
Icelandic expletive is assumed to be generated initially, in Spec,CP, and
the Swedish expletive in Spec,IP or Spec,VP (see e.g. Sigurðsson 1991,
2000, Christensen 1991, Vikner 1995, Vangsnes 2002, Thráinsson 2007
and Platzack 2010).7 Support for this account comes from the fact that
the Icelandic presentational expletive það only appears in Spec,CP, not
sentence-internally, in the IP, whereas the Swedish det is normally
required in Spec,IP and consequently blocks pivots from appearing
there.
(7) Hefur (*það) verið einhver köttur í eldhúsinu? (Ice.)
has expl been some cat in kitchen.def
‘Has there been a cat in the kitchen?’
(8) Har *(det) varit en katt i köket? (Swe.)
has expl been some cat in kitchen.def
‘Has there been a cat in the kitchen?’
The simplified trees in (9) and (10) illustrate this.8 In the Icelandic tree,
the expletive það is generated in Spec,CP and the pivot einhver köttur
‘some cat’ is first generated in Spec,VP and then raised to Spec,IP.
Engdahl, Sigurðsson, Zaenen and Maling126
6 Some northern Swedish dialects allow morphologically definite pivots but they are
interpreted as indefinite, see Delsing (2003) and Dahl (2015).
7 Without further assumptions, Platzack’s analysis cannot account for the use of
expletive það in embedded clauses. See Sigurðsson (2010) for a more articulate analysis in
terms of feature matching which assumes that expletive það is in the low C-domain (i.e.,
not in the high C-domain) in both main and subordinate clauses.
8 We leave out the raising of the auxiliary to C and the internal structure of the VP in
these simplified trees. See the tree in (15) for the full VP structure.