Íslenskt mál og almenn málfræði - 2020, Qupperneq 152

(79)a. Ég man ekki hvort (það) hefur verið einhver köttur í eldhúsinu. (Ice.)
I remember not if expl has been some cat in kitchen.def
‘I don’t remember if there has been a cat in the kitchen.’
b. Ég held að (það) verði ball í skólanum á morgun.
I think that expl will.be dance in school.def tomorrow
‘I think that there will be a dance in the school tomorrow.’
c. Ég man ekki hvenær (það) voru síðast mýs í baðkerinu.
I remember not when expl were last mice in bathtub.def
‘I don’t remember when there were last mice in the bathtub.’
It thus seems that in both Swedish and Icelandic, overt expletives in IP
are sensitive to whether or not there is a finite verb in C. Other
researchers have found that this factor also affects extraction possibilities,
see Bentzen et al. (2007) and Lindahl (2017). Vikner (2017) and Nyvad et
al. (2017) argue that it is necessary to make a distinction between CP,
with a verbal C, and cP with a complementizer head in Germanic verb
second languages.
4.3 Summary
In this section we have shown that it is not the case that IP-pivots are not
found in Swedish; they are the only option when the pivot contains an
incorporated negation. However, this does not offset the restriction
against Experiencer and Goal pivots, as shown in (66). It seems plausible
that negated pivots are realized low in the IP-domain in both languages,
possibly in Spec,NegP, as suggested by Engels (2010). For some speakers,
positive IP-pivots cannot co-occur with negated objects in the IP-domain
in Icelandic, see (72c), although this may be affected by focus. Our survey
of the distribution of negated pivots has also revealed that there is a dif-
ference between main and subordinate clauses with respect to expletive
det in Swedish, similar to the better known difference regarding það in
Icelandic main and subordinate clauses.
5. Distinguishing presentational sentences
In the introduction we gave an admittedly not very precise definition of
presentational sentences, viz. sentences that assert, or deny, the existence
of a referent or present a hitherto unmentioned referent in a situation.
Despite its vagueness, we think that this captures the gist of the construc-
tion (see e.g. Sundman 1980, Sveen 1996 and Teleman et al. 1999:Vol. 3,
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