No abstract

This paper argues for a unified analysis of mainland Scandinavian pronominal object shift and Icelandic full NP shift. Building on data showing the impact of accessibility on object placement in Swedish, Danish and Icelandic, I propose an Optimality Theoretic analysis where semantic/pragmatic constraints involving accessibility, information structure and contrast interact, but are ranked lower than syntactic constraints on, for example, verb placement. Finally, the impact of prosody on pronominal object shift is discussed.

This special issue of the Nordic Journal of Linguistics is devoted to articles on a construction which since Holmberg (1986) has been referred to as object shift. Whereas sentential adverbs normally precede the object in Scandinavian, as shown in (1a), they tend to follow the object, when it is a pronoun, as in (1b).

Call for papers: NJL Special Issue on Object Shift in the Nordic Languages Object shift is the term used for examples like (1), where an object occurs to the left of a sentential adverb, rather than in its canonical position further right in the clause: (1) Han köpte den inte. Swedish he bought it not 'He didn't buy the book.'