The function of SF
3.9. The relation between the low periphery and SF: Object Shift
Point (ii) above is complicated by the syntactic properties of the lower clausal part characterizing Icelandic. On a par with other Scandinavian languages, Icelandic has object shift (OS) both for pronouns and, optionally, for full NPs (contrary to Mainland Scandinavian, which doesn’t have OS for full NPs). OS in Icelandic, as well as in the other Scandinavian languages, is subject to the Holmberg’s Generalization (HG). Compare the possibility to have pronominal OS (in (250)) and full NP OS (in (251)) in Icelandic and Danish.
(250) a. Nemandinn las hana ekki ___ (Icelandic)
Student.the read it not b. *Nemandinn las ekki hana Student.the read not it
c. Studenten læste den ikke __ (Danish)
Student.the read it not d. *Studenten læste ikke den Student.the read not it
“The student does not read it”
(251) a. Nemandinn las ekki bókina (Icelandic)
Student.the read not book.the b. Nemandinn las bókina ekki ___ Student.the read book.the not
c. Studenten læste ikke bogen (Danish)
Student.the read not book.the d. *Studenten læste bogen ikke Student.the read book.the not
“The student does not read the book”
However, unlike other Scandinavian languages, HG does not hold for negative object movement (NM) in Icelandic, as shown by (54) above, repeated below for convenience
(252) a. Ég hef enga bók keypt ___ (Icelandic) I have no book bought
b. *Ég hef keypt enga bók I have bought no book
“I didn’t buy any book” [Delsing 2001, 157, 43] Depending on the choice of the quantifier (and on the dimension of the phrase, cf. Svenonius (2000)), also quantifier movement (QM) behaves like NM in Icelandic, thus escaping HG. However, QM is not obligatory, contrary to NM:
(253) a. Jón hefur ýmislegt þurft __ að þola Jón has various had to tolerate
“Jón has had to put up with various things” b. ?Jón hefur ýmsa erfiðleika þurft __ að þola Jón has various things had to tolerate
“Jón has had various things to put up with” [Svenonius 2000, 261, 14] Furthermore, it is worth pointing out that optional OS of full NPs regards almost exclusively definite NPs, not indefinite ones, for the reason that:
“constituents representing new information cannot readily undergo OS. Since indefinite NPs frequently represent new information, they are rarely shifted” (Thráinsson 2007, p.76).
This is illustrated below:
(254) Ég á ekkert eftir Chomsky I have nothing by Chomsky a. Átt þú ekki eitthvað? Have you not something b. *Átt þú eitthvað ekki ____? Have you something not
“I don’t have anything by Chomsky/ Don’t you have anything?”
[Thráinsson 2007, 75, 2.105] Thráinsson (2007) further observes that indefinite NPs can nonetheless shift when they have a specific interpretation, as illustrated by the contrast in (256) below: (255) a. Ég las aldrei þriár bækur
I read(past) never three books “I never read three books” b. Ég las þriár bækur aldrei ___ I read(past) three books never
The data of the Icelandic lower clausal part can be summarized and interpreted as follows. On the one hand, Thráinsson’s (2007) observations are in line with Diesing (1996) analysis of OS as a way to remove (definite) expressions from the focused part of the clause. On the other hand, Svenonius (2000) proposes that NM and QM in Icelandic are feature-driven and, because of this81, not subject to HG, in contrast to OS
which is a semantically driven phenomenon, as proposed by Diesing (1996). Regardless the type of trigger for object movement, what is relevant to the present discussion is the possibility for an object to evacuate the VP, leaving a remnant as potential candidate for SF. What emerges from these observations is that (at least) two types of movement target the vP periphery in Icelandic. One is OS, which regards only objects and, according to Diesing (1996); Svenonius (2000) and Thráinsson (2007), a.o., is semantically driven and subject to HG. The other type of movement is not subject to HG and is realized as NM or QM, the latter being non-obligatory. A distinction between raised objects and quantifier or negative movement is found in Old Italian as well. Following the facts and proposal illustrated in Egerland (1996), Italian OV order with preverbal objects is derived by movement of the DP objects to AgrOP, whereby agreement on the past participle is triggered. This movement type reminds intuitively of OS, with the difference that it is not subject to HG and not limited to pronouns. By contrast, QM and NM in Old Italian display a different behavior from object movement to AgrOP. I do not develop this topic further here, as it is not strictly pertinent to my discussion (see Poletto 2005 for details). It is nonetheless worth pointing out that, in addition to these two types of movement (i.e. object movement to AgrOP and QM/NM82), a third type is movement to the functional projection arbitrarily labeled
Spec,LowFocP, which is generalized to all kind of (focalizable) elements.
Now, consider (256) below, which seems a case of verbal complement stranding (with the stranded object in italics), apparently contradicting the expectations of the remnant movement analysis of SF:
(256) Hann spurði hver sullað hefði bjórnum (Icelandic) He asked who spilt had beer.the
“He asked who had spilt the beer” [Hrafnbjargarson 2003, 158, 11] In light of the facts concerning the Icelandic object properties in the low clausal part, the difficulty presented by (256) is solved as in the simplified structural representation given in Figure 7. below, where the Wh- element hver is supposed to reach a the edge of the subordinate clause selected by the main verb spurði.
81 See Svenonius 2000 for an explanation of the feature- and semantically-driven movement types and
their relation to HG.
Figure 7. “hver sullað hefði bjórnum”
Derivation steps of the subordinate clause in (256) (crucial steps only):
Step 1. Once the thematic structure is complete, the DP object undergoes OS to the OSP located above vP.
Step 2. Merger of the auxiliary hefði in I
Step 3. Pied-piping of the remnant vP to Spec,IP for a case-checking requirement on the Wh- hver.
Step 4. SF of vP-to-Spec,FinP from Spec,IP (a position lower than SubjP, which is empty)
Step 5. Extraction of the Wh- phrase to the edge of CP, from the remnant vP which now consists of the verbal head sullað.
According to the derivation in Figure 7. the object bjórnum, being definite, is free to undergo OS to a higher position (which I label OSPhrase for the sake of simplicity). A first difference from Old Italian SF given in Figures 5. and 6. above is that Icelandic SF is movement of a remnant vP, rather than a VP, in this case. The possibility that SF moves a phrase larger than a VP, i.e. the vP83, in the present case, is related to the
visibility condition of the latter at the phase edge and is subject to specific conditions: (i)a. the subject must be either absent (i.e. null), or
(i)b. the subject must be extracted/extraposed84, and
(ii) the VP must be early evacuated of the object, if any.
In (256), condition (i)b. is satisfied because the Wh- subject hver is extracted to a left peripheral position. Condition (ii) is satisfied by OS. In principle, OS in (256) should be ruled out by HG, given that a the object, in its base position, follows a past participle. Nonetheless the HG violation is repaired by subsequent fronting of the (remnant containing the) non-finite verb to the CP. A similar strategy, repairing for HG violations, has been observed by Holmberg (1999). Holmberg observes that cases of “remnant VP fronting85” in Mainland Scandinavian escape HG, and he concludes that “HG is due to a
surface filter” (p. 8):
VP OS Neg
(257) Kysst har jag henne inte (bara hållit henne i handen) (Swedish) Kissed have I her not only held her in hand.the
“I haven’t kissed her (just hold her hand)” [Holmberg, 1999, 7, 11]
83 It is difficult to determine syntactically whether VP or a larger phrase, e.g. vP, undergoes SF in
Icelandic, due to the remnant status of the stylistically fronted phrase. I assume that SF targets phrases which are visible at the edge of the vP and that movement operations respect antilocality restrictions.
84 The presence of a condition like (i)b. is attested by the paradigm in (iii) in Icelandic, where an indefinite
subject in Spec, IP (not necessarily in Spec, SubjP, but potentially lower, cf. Thráinsson 2007, ch.6) is possible as associate of an expletive in (iii)a. (a construction resulting from external merge), but not in a clause with SF, in (iii)c (resulting from movement). By contrast, SF is grammatical with an extraposed subject, as in (iii)d.:
(iii) a. það var þá sem það voru einhverjir kettir reknir út it was there that there were some cats driven out
b. það var þá sem það voru reknir einhverjir kettir út/ út einhverjir kettir it was there that there were driven some cats out/ out some cats c. *það var þá sem út voru einhverjir kettir reknir
it was there that out were some cats driven d. það var þá sem út voru reknir einhverjir kettir it was there that out were driven some cats
“It was there where some cats were driven out” [Thráinsson 2007, 331, 6.51] The paradigm in (iii) is subject to the further complication that einhverjir kettir is the subject of a passive structure, therefore not merged in Spec,vP, but A-raised to IP from the V-complement position, via smuggling (cf. Figure 6. above). As a consequence, the only way in which SF can be compatible with an overt subject is via extraposition of the latter. The sentences in (iii) are chosen on purpose. They show particle SF, because the exact subject position can be detected by leaving the past participle in situ. Under the assumption that past participles and particle are equally accessible to SF, the conditions ruling out (iii)c. but not (iii)d. would replicate for SF of the remnant vP containing the past participle. The derivation of particle SF is given in the next section.
85 Different from Icelandic SF: remnant VP fronting is a stressed construction, not in complementary
Since the vP in (256) is evacuated by OS, the remnant can undergo SF to Spec,FinP. Under this analysis, evacuation not only occurs under the form of OS but also as NM or QM in Icelandic.
As for (257), HG does not rule out OS in (256) above, because the past participle does not linearly follow the shifted object.86 In this perspective, an additional reason
impeding SF in Mainland Scandinavian languages may be related to the impossibility for full NPs to undergo OS and evacuate the VP/vP. Of course, one may reply that the presence of OS in (256) is controversial as it would be a string vacuous movement in that case. This is true and it cannot be tested with phrasal adverbs either, since they would need to be fronted instead of the past participle, as predicted by Maling’s hierarchy. Thus, a sentence like (258) where the object has visibly undergone shift past the phrasal adverb aldrei is ungrammatical for independent reasons (namely, phrasal adverbs are ranked in a higher position in the hierarchy of SF, cf. (40) above):
(258)a. … *hver hefði bjórnum aldrei sullað *OS for HG (Icelandic) who had beer.the never spilt
b. … *hver sullað hefði bjórnum aldrei ___ *SF of participle over phrasal adverb who had beer.the spilt never
“…Who had never spilt the beer”