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Coordination and word order in the history of Swedish
Author(s) -
Petzell Erik Magnusson
Publication year - 2010
Publication title -
transactions of the philological society
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.333
H-Index - 26
eISSN - 1467-968X
pISSN - 0079-1636
DOI - 10.1111/j.1467-968x.2010.01239.x
Subject(s) - word order , trace (psycholinguistics) , linguistics , verb , order (exchange) , word (group theory) , dependent clause , computer science , position (finance) , history , philosophy , sentence , finance , economics
This article deals with the relations between coordination and word order in the history of Swedish. In Present‐day Swedish, the finite verb always raises to C o in main‐clause coordination, whereas it always remains in situ (in VP) in subordinate clause coordination. In Older Swedish, either verbal position was possible in both cases. In addition, VS word order was used in contexts where it would be ungrammatical today. Subordinate conjuncts with V in C o , main clause conjuncts with V in V o , and VS conjuncts are all analysed as parts of coordination, in which only the first conjunct contains a trace after an extracted element; this type of trace asymmetry characterises a wide range of coordinate structures in Older Swedish. In the modern language, on the other hand, a trace in a first conjunct is always matched with equivalent traces in all subsequent conjuncts (the traces occur across the board).