Stylistic Fronting

Abstract

Stylistic Fronting (SF) is a phenomenon where a syntactic constituent is moved to what looks like the subject position in finite sentences with a subject gap, that is, subject relatives, embedded subject questions, other embedded sentences with the subject extracted, and various types of impersonal sentences. The phenomenon has mainly been studied in the context of Icelandic, Faroese, and Old Scandinavian, but is now known also to occur in Old Romance languages, and SF‐like phenomena can be observed in various other languages, too. A striking property of SF is the range of categories that can undergo the movement: they include participles, infinitives, predicative adjectives, verb particles, adverbs, the negation, PPs, and DPs. Although SF looks like movement to a vacant subject position, the categories moved are mostly not subject‐like at all. Another striking property of SF is the lack of a distinctive semantic effect. One of the key questions in the research on SF is: what kind of movement is SF? Does it fall into any of the established types of movement (A‐movement, A‐bar movement, head movement), or is it a distinct, new type of movement? Is it movement in the phonological component (which would explain the lack of semantic effect)? What function does it have? What is the movement trigger? The chapter will enumerate and discuss the syntactic, diagnostic properties of SF, taking SF in Icelandic as the standard. It will discuss and compare the various syntactic analyses proposed in the literature for SF, and the theories proposed to explain the properties of SF.

Head movement to specifier positions

“…In its discourse contribution, participle fronting in Bulgarian is not unlike "long" head movement in Breton(Borsley & Kathol 2000: 67; see alsoSchafer 1997) and stylistic fronting in Icelandic(Holmberg 2017).34 The focus here has been on syntactic head movements with A-bar properties. However, the Internal Merge analysis of syntactic head movement leads to the expectation that A-movement of heads may also exist.…”

Stylistic fronting in corpora

“…The central traits of SF are listed in (2) (see, e.g., Maling 1980, Jónsson 1991, Holmberg 2000, 2006, Thráinsson 2007:352ff., Angantýsson 2011.…”