Íslenskt mál og almenn málfræði - 2020, Page 150

4.2 A difference between main and subordinate clauses
As we have seen, the Swedish expletive det may appear in IP, see (8).
More precisely, it can appear immediately after a finite verb in C in
matrix clauses, but not in other subject positions. In (74a) we see that a
proper name subject can appear either after the finite verb, after a senten-
tial adverb or after the negation but an unstressed pronoun can only
appear directly after the finite verb (Teleman et al. 1999:Vol. 4, 19). This
also applies to expletives in Swedish, as shown in the presentational sen-
tence in (74c).26
(74)a. Igår hade Eva antagligen (Eva) inte (Eva) varit där. (Swe.)
yesterday had Eva probably Eva not Eva been there
‘Yesterday, Eva probably hadn’t been there.’
b. Igår hade hon antagligen (*hon) inte (*hon) varit där.
yesterday had she probably she not she been there
‘Yesterday, she probably hadn’t been there.’
c. Igår hade det antagligen (*det) inte (*det) varit någon där.
yesterday had expl probably expl not expl been anybody there
‘Yesterday, there had probably not been anybody there.’
Given that expletives can only appear in immediate post-finite position
in the Swedish IP-domain, we would expect examples like the ones in
(75) to be fine. In actual fact they are quite bad with overt expletives, as
pointed out in Engels (2010).
(75)a. Har (?*det) ingen kommit än? (Swe.)
has expl nobody come yet
‘Has nobody come yet?’
b. Idag har (?*det) tyvärr ingen kommit än.
today has expl unfortunately nobody come yet
‘Today unfortunately nobody has come yet.’
Engels (2010) compares subject positions in Faroese with Mainland
Scandinavian. On her analysis, subjects in the IP have to be locally licensed
through D-feature checking by a finite verb (Engels 2010:114ff.). On her
Engdahl, Sigurðsson, Zaenen and Maling150
26 See Sigurðsson (2000, 2019), Svenonius (2002) and Thráinsson (2007) for discussion
about possible subject positions and see Lundquist et al. (2019) for a presentation of the
Nordic Word Order Database where production data from 250 speakers of North Ger -
manic, including Icelandic and Swedish, have been collected. The variable Subject Shift is
particularly relevant.