Anna-Lena Wiklund

Dressing Up For Vocabulary Insertion: The Parasitic Supine

In the context of a subclass of bare complements in Swedish, the present paper argues for a structure of grammar that partly separates the mechanisms that build syntactico-semantic structures from those determining the phonological expression of these. The parasitic supine construction displays the properties that are relevant for such a separation: a clear-cut discrepancy between form and meaning. The construction type exemplifies a complementation strategy available for a restricted class of infinitive selecting verbs in variants of the Scandinavian languages. The complement verb surfaces with an inflection identical to that of the matrix verb, yet the form has no effect on the interpretation, which remains the same as for the infinitival counterpart used in the standard language. The approach makes use of grammatical feature underspecification, the seeming gap between meaning and form being bridged by selectional restrictions and constraints on the relevant syntactic configuration. On the basis of its distribution, it is proposed that the phenomenon is a restructuring effect. The form is the result of morphological manipulations of the underspecified syntactico-semantic structure, providing it with the necessary clothes for Vocabulary Insertion.

In search of the force of dependent verb second

This short communication is a brief extension of recent work on verb second in Scandinavian declarative clauses and is a contribution to research on the relation between V2 and illocutionary force. It is argued that Swedish data present a problem for the hypothesis that a bi-conditional relation holds between the illocutionary force of an assertion and the verb second word order. The relevant force, to the extent that we can identify it, appears to be available also in the absence of V2 word order. It is tentatively suggested that V2 encodes evidentiality.

Observations on extraction from V2 clauses in Scandinavian

Abstract in Undetermined This short communication presents a general overview of facts concerning wh-extraction from V2 clauses in the Scandinavian languages. While extraction from V2 clauses with a fronted non-subject is impossible in all of these languages, three classes can be distinguished with regard to extraction from subject-initial V2 clauses.

Creating Surprise in Complex Predication

In many languages, the verbs take and go may combine with another predicate to yield an inceptive reading, where the onset of the event denoted by the main predicate is in some sense focalized. Some of these cases have a touch of surprise, unexpectedness, or suddenness to them. Using data mainly from Swedish, this paper seeks to identify the components that are responsible for this surprise reading. It is argued that surprise in the relevant constructions is derivable from a combination of three factors: (i) the particular event structure(s) associated with the predicates involved, (ii) choice of lexicalization of this structure, and (iii) pragmatic inferences about the particular event involved. The data presented in this paper offer support for Ramchand’s (2008) treatment of light verbs in terms of underassociation of lexical category features and constraints thereon.

Processing Relative Clause Extractions in Swedish

Relative clauses are considered strong islands for extraction across languages. Swedish comprises a well-known exception, allegedly allowing extraction from relative clauses (RCE), raising the possibility that island constraints may be subject to “deep variation” between languages. One alternative is that such exceptions are only illusory and represent “surface variation” attributable to independently motivated syntactic properties. Yet, to date, no surface account has proven tenable for Swedish RCEs. The present study uses eyetracking while reading to test whether the apparent acceptability of Swedish RCEs has any processing correlates at the point of filler integration compared to uncontroversial strong island violations. Experiment 1 tests RCE against licit that-clause extraction (TCE), illicit extraction from a non-restrictive relative clause (NRCE), and an intransitive control. For this, RCE was found to pattern similarly to TCE at the point of integration in early measures, but between TCE and NRCE in total durations. Experiment 2 uses RCE and extraction from a subject NP island (SRCE) to test the hypothesis that only non-islands will show effects of implausible filler-verb dependencies. RCE showed sensitivity to the plausibility manipulation across measures at the first potential point of filler integration, whereas such effects were limited to late measures for SRCE. In addition, structural facilitation was seen across measures for RCE relative to SRCE. We propose that our results are compatible with RCEs being licit weak island extractions in Swedish, and that the overall picture speaks in favor of a surface rather than a deep variation approach to the lack of island effects in Swedish RCEs.