Variation in Mainland Scandinavian Object Shift and Prosodic Repair
Nomi Erteschik-Shir, Gunlög Josefsson, Björn Köhnlein
direct link: http://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/003688
October 2017
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.