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In this book, Holmberg and Platzack present a theory of the role which subject-verb agreement and case morphology play in syntax. Their theory is based mainly on a detailed comparison and inflectional properties in the various Scandinavian languages, although many other languages are discussed as well. The theoretical issues discussed include abstract vs. morphological case, functional heads, verb-second, null subjects and other empty categories, pronouns and clitics, various impersonal constructions, long distance reflexives, and the double object construction. Probably the most detailed and comprehensive study to date of the interplay of case, subject-verb agreement, and other grammatical properties in the syntax of related languages, this book offers important insights for professional linguists and students with an interest in generative grammar, typology/comparative grammar, or Scandinavian and Germanic languages.

This book provides a number of studies of different aspects of Swedish child language. Some of the thematic chapters present original, unpublished data: on the acquisition of tense, on the range and frequency of different word order patterns in early child Swedish, related to the input, meaning the language of adults talking to the children or in the presence of the children. The remaining chapters present overviews of previous research: on the acquisition of word formation rules, the noun phrase, and wh-questions. The introduction to this volume contains a concise overview of the basic features of Swedish grammar and a comprehensive overview of different Swedish child language corpora. The main body of research proceeds within a generative framework, but the text is designed to be accessible to researchers of different theoretical paradigms.

This paper presents a structural account of imperative clauses where the theoretical cornerstones are the Minimalist Program of Chomsky (1995) and the analysis of the C-domain in Rizzi (1995). According to Rizzi, the C-domain has at least two parts, the outward facing ForceP, a sentence type projection where information of the type of the clause is represented, and an inward facing part, FinP, related to tense and mood. We argue in this paper that the main difference between imperative clauses and other sentence types is the lack of FinP and hence finiteness in imperative clauses; having no FinP, imperative clauses also lack MoodP and TP. The imperative clause is thus less articulated compared with the declarative and interrogative clauses. From the lack of FinP follow the three most salient properties of imperative clauses: the morphologically meagre form of the verb, the impossibility of embedding imperative clauses, and the lack of a prototypical subject. The last mentioned fact has the consequence that an imperative clause can never be used to refer to the addressee in the same way as a declarative and interrogative clause can: imperative clauses can only be used to talk TO the addressee, not ABOUT him or her. We support our theoretical approach by empirical evidence drawn mainly from German, English, and Mainland Scandinavian.

Insular Scandinavian (Faroese, Icelandic) differs from Mainland Scandinavian (Danish, Norwegian, Swedish) in that in the former, empty subjects are possible in tense clauses, whereas they are impossible in the latter. Unlike the Romance langs, however, only a nonargument, ie, an argument corresponding to the expletive it in Eng, may be empty. The differences between the two varieties of Scandinavian are shown to correlate with various other grammatical differences; eg, violations of the that-trace filter, subject inversion, & subject-V agreement are characteristic of Icelandic & Faroese but not of the Mainland langs. A particular formulation of the null-subject parameter of government-binding theory is advocated. The differences between the Scandinavian langs are then shown to follow from the assumption that the Mainland & Insular langs are specified for different values of this parameter. The differences between Romance & Scandinavian are attributed to differences in basic sentence structure. Dialectal & diachronic evidence confirms the hypothesis that such properties as V-subject agreement, subject inversion, etc, are related to the possibility of having null subjects. 1 Table, 44 References. P. Farrell

Mandatory phrasal prominence on a constituent in English is often attributed to the presence of a focus interpretation for that constituent, be it focus as discourse new or as selection among discourse relevant alternatives. It is argued here that these two functions of focus should be empirically distinguished and use of the notion \"focus\" restricted to the latter function alone. Phrasal prosodic prominence in discourse new constituents is attributed to default prosody, namely the focus-insensitive mapping between syntactic and prosodic structures. Evidence is garnered to support the notion of default prosodic prominence. This proposal is then briefly applied to Hungarian.

Embedded imperatives are found in Old Scandinavian, but not in any of its modern descendants, i.e. Danish, Faroese, Icelandic, Norwegian or Swedish. This paper aims to uncover the structural prerequisites for embedded imperatives to be possible in a language. Assuming a feature driven version of the minimalist program, it is shown that embedded imperatives are possible under the specific structural requirement that the non-finite verb is in a position lower than the object, i.e. in a kind of partial OV-structure that I will call pseudo-OV, differing from ordinary OV in having the tensed verb before the object, both in main and embedded clauses. A number of predictions follow which are indeed fulfilled, such as the obligatory presence of the second person subject, the position of the imperative verb in front of the object, and the fact that the kinds of objects found in embedded imperatives are the ones that also turn up in clauses with pseudo-OV in Old Scandinavian.