Íslenskt mál og almenn málfræði - 2020, Page 155

4.1. However, there we only had examples with intransitive verbs. The
verbs göra ‘do, make’ and köpa ‘buy’ in (84) are agentive and should not
appear in Swedish presentationals on Platzack’s account, where Agents
and expletives are in complementary distribution in Spec,vP, see (15). In
order to account for examples like these, Håkansson suggests that
Swedish also has had the option of merging an expletive directly in the C-
domain, like Icelandic. This is supported by the observation that in most
of the older examples he discusses, the expletive appears initially.
Examples like (84) are not found in modern standard Swedish; instead
one would use a presentational cleft.
(85)a. Det finns ingen som kan göra den saken bättre än han.
expl exists nobody that can do that thing.def better than he
‘There is nobody who can do that better than him.’
b. Det är inte många som köper sina kläder så billigt som hon.
expl are not many that buy their.refl clothes as cheaply as she
‘There aren’t many people who buy their clothes as cheaply as she does.’
5.2 Expressive constructions in Swedish
Another common type in Håkansson’s Swedish data is shown in (86a),
from the Nordic Dialect Corpus (NDC).
(86)a. nej sa jag, det ska jag inte köpa någon bil. (Swe.)
no said I expl shall I not buy any car
‘No, said I, I will definitely not buy a car.’
b. Därför ska (*det) jag inte köpa någon bil.
therefore shall expl I not buy any car
‘Therefore I won’t buy a car.’
On Håkansson’s analysis, examples such as (86a) involve an expletive
topic det, merged in Spec,CP, just like Icelandic það. (86b) shows that it
cannot appear in post-finite position.32 However, this type of sentence
with það and a pronominal subject is ungrammatical in Icelandic.
Thematic constraints on presentational sentences in Icelandic and Swedish 155
32 A reviewer suggests that (86a) could involve an anticipating det and a right-dislocat-
ed VP. Compare the left-dislocated version Köpa någon bil, det ska jag inte. The dislocated
construction is not uncommon in spoken Swedish (see Lindahl and Engdahl submitted)
but it is not a plausible analysis for (86a) as becomes clear when one listens to the utterance.
The soundfiles for NDC are easily accessible at ⟨http://www.tekstlab.uio.no/nota/scan
diasyn/index.html⟩.