Variation in Mainland Scandinavian Object Shift and Prosodic Repair
Nomi Erteschik-Shir, Gunlög Josefsson, Björn Köhnlein
July 2019
 

In this paper we argue for an analysis of Object Shift (OS) in Mainland Scandinavian (MSc) in which the shifted word order is the result of a prosodic repair to enable weak pronoun incorporation. We observe that varieties with optional OS also have a tone accent contrast. We argue that the in-situ word order is licensed in these dialects because tonal accent creates a prosodic domain licensing the incorporation of the weak pronoun. The proposal has important implications for our understanding of the architecture of the grammar – it provides evidence that at least some cases of word order can better be attributed to phonological computation, rather than to narrow syntax.
Format: [ pdf ]
Reference: lingbuzz/003688
(please use that when you cite this article)
Published in: Linguistic Inquiry (early access)
keywords: object shift, prosodic repair, tone accent unit, match theory, swedish, ærø danish, syntax, phonology
previous versions: v1 [October 2017]
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