Structure, Alignment and Optimality in Swedish

Peter Sells

This volume explores the grammatical structure of sentences in Swedish, presenting an account of the order of the words and phrases within the clause. This analysis is presented from the perspective of Optimality Theory -- a theory of constraint interpretation which allows constraints to conflict by allowing the satisfaction of certain constraints or requirements to lead to a grammatical structure even if less important constraints are violated -- within the theoretical framework of Lexical-Functional Grammar. This framework provides syntactic analysis in terms of functions within the clause such as subject, object, and also topic and focus, as well as part-of-speech analysis in terms of noun phrase, verb phrase, and so on, and the hierarchical structure of those constituents. Sells argues for the superiority of a base-generated account of the phenomenon known as Object Shift, and shows how an account based on the notion of Alignment within a ranked constraint system provides a natural account of it. The nature of the Verb-Second sentence pattern and syntactic differences between Swedish and the other Mainland Scandinavian languages are also considered.

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5/1/2001

ISBN (Paperback): 1575862328

ISBN (Cloth): 157586231X

Subject: Swedish language--Grammar; Optimality Theory (Linguistics)