Íslenskt mál og almenn málfræði - 2020, Page 148
Even if presentational sentences with negated IP-pivots like (62a) and
(67a) are found in contemporary Swedish, it is more common to find sen-
tences with a negation or a negative adverb like aldrig ‘never’ in the IP and
a polarity-sensitive item like någon ‘anybody’ in the VP, as shown in
(69a). Note that någon is infelicitous in the IP, see (69b).23
(69)a. Det har inte varit någon här. (Swe.)
expl has not been anybody here
‘Nobody has been here.’
b. *Det har inte någon varit här.
expl has not anybody been here
In Swedish, någon is ambiguous between being a negative or positive
polarity item, corresponding to ‘anybody’ or ‘somebody’. The cognate
nokkur in Icelandic is also ambiguous, with the meaning ‘any’ in the scope
of negation, whereas neinn is only a negative polarity item.24
(70)a. Það hefur ekki verið nokkur maður hér. (Ice.)
expl has not been any person here
‘Nobody has been here.’
b. Það hefur ekki nokkur maður verið hér.
expl has not any person been here
c. *Það mun ekki hafa nokkur maður verið hér.
expl will not have any person been here
(71)a. Það hefur ekki verið neinn hér. (Ice.)
expl has not been anybody here
‘Nobody has been here.’
b. Það hefur ekki neinn verið hér.
expl has not anybody been here
Engdahl, Sigurðsson, Zaenen and Maling148
23 Engels assumes that the Spec,NegP position for incorporated items was available in
the Mainland Scandinavian languages around 1900 (Engels 2010:126ff.). If this were true,
we would expect negated IP-pivots to be more frequent in older texts than in contempo-
rary texts. However, corpus searches in the historical materials for Swedish in Korp (1.3
billion words) show that such examples were not more common in those texts than in con-
temporary texts. Rather it seems that placing negated pivots and objects in the IP has
remained an option in the language, from old Swedish until now, to some extent governed
by stylistic factors. According to Engels (2012), Danish is similar to Swedish, but
Norwegian has more or less lost this option.
24 Positive ‘somebody’ may also be expressed by einhver. See Axelsdóttir (2018) for an
overview of the respective use conditions.