Gunlög Josefsson

Minimal words in a minimal syntax : word formation in Swedish

In Minimal Words in a Minimal Syntax the author combines a detailed description of the morphological structure of words in Swedish with a daring new approach to theoretical morphology, based on the Minimalist Program of Chomsky (1995) (as developed for syntactic structure). The X-bar theoretic approach to word structure of the Principles and Parameters framework is replaced by a rule free approach incorporating only Merge and Move as structure building devices. The author argues that stems have no word class features, which are provided inflectional affixes (including theme vowels etc.). Inflectional and derivational affixes differ only in the external syntactic requirement that inflectional affixes are associated with features that require checking in the functional domain. An important analysis of compounding is included, where binding elements are analyzed as a result of structural antisymmetry requirements a la Kayne (1994). Old chestnuts of morphological theory, such as the notion “head of a word” and the nature and structure of the lexicon, are succinctly discussed in the light of the theoretical proposals advanced here. On the empirical side, there are two lengthy chapters involving the semantic characterization of prefixes and suffixes in Swedish, explaining their distribution in terms of “types of Aktionsarten” imposed by the affix on its host.

The meaning of lexical classes

Following the spirit of Relativized Extreme Functionalism, I argue that a set of grammatical features, traditionally thought of as devoid of semantics, lexical class (declension and conjugation), in fact has semantic content. Taking Josefsson (1995, 1997, 1998) as a point of departure, I suggest that the lexical class determines the word class of a word, hence relating the word to a major ontological category such as THING and EVENT. A certain lexical class may correspond to a semantic subclass of a major ontological category, but this does not need to be the case. The approach taken explains certain morphological phenomena in Swedish, such as stem vowels, and explains why the non-head part of a compound is undetermined for major ontological category.

The PP-CP Parallelism Hypothesis and Language Acquisition: Evidence from Swedish

The main topic of this book is the acquisition of scrambling and cliticization. In this article we will, however, not explore reordering processes. Instead, we will focus on the other side of the same coin, namely the acquisition of the basic structure of the clause and the PP. It is, we believe, important to explore these basic structures, especially the setup and hierarchical order of functional categories, in order to understand the nature of reordering processes of different kinds. (For Swedish the object shift operation is the reordering process most closely related to scrambling and cliticization).1

Scandinavian object shift is phonology

The problem addressed in this paper is a case of word order microvariation in Mainland Scandinavian: optional vs. obligatory Object Shift (OS). Following standard assumptions (see Selkirk 1996), weak object pronouns are assumed to be affixal clitics at PF which do not themselves have the status of prosodic words. Since adverbs (including negation), areunsuitable as hosts, weak object pronouns may undergo OS, in other words precede adverbs, ending up encliticized onto the preceding verb or subject. In standard Danish, OS is obligatory; the order adverb+weak pronoun is blocked. However, in Swedish, OS is optional, as isthe case for some Danish dialects, spoken in the southeastern island area. In our paper we explain the distribution of optional vs. obligatory OS by the phonological properties of the two varieties. What “optional OS” in Swedish and varieties of Danish have in common is the occurrence of a tonal accent, which creates a larger phonological unit than the minimalprosodic word, a Tonal Unit. We propose that the mechanism that allows a weak pronoun toremain in the canonical position in Swedish and the southeastern island dialects in Danish,is the availability of tonal accent. The tonal accent enables the inclusion of the pronoun insuch a unit. Standard Danish, on the other hand, lacks tonal accent altogether which is why OS is obligatory in this dialect. (Less)

Scandinavian gender and pancake sentences : A reply to Hans-Olav Enger

In a recent NJL article (Enger 2013), Hans-Olav Enger argues against some analyses of gender and ‘pancake sentences’, in particular against Josefsson (2009). In this short contribution, I will discuss what I take to be misunderstandings in Enger (2013). In addition I will discuss some data not included in Enger’s (2013) analysis, which I will show to be crucial for the comparison between the different analyses proposed.