**Preface to "Recent Advances in Research on Island Phenomena"**

This book consists of a collection of papers presenting state-of-the-art research on the phenomenon known as 'syntactic islands'—structural configurations that to varying degrees resist word order variation involving extraction. The focus is on data from English and the Scandinavian languages, and the volume presents accounts from different theoretical perspectives (including minimalist syntax and construction grammar) taking different methodological approaches (e.g., corpus linguistics, experimental linguistics, and theoretical syntax).

**Anne Mette Nyvad and Ken Ramshøj Christensen**

*Editors*

## *Editorial* **Recent Advances in Research on Island Phenomena**

**Anne Mette Nyvad \* and Ken Ramshøj Christensen \***

Department of English, School of Communication and Culture, Aarhus University, 8000 Aarhus C, Denmark **\*** Correspondence: amn@cc.au.dk (A.M.N.); krc@cc.au.dk (K.R.C.)

In natural languages, syntactic elements can, in principle, be linked across an unbounded distance, as exemplified by filler-gap dependencies (also known as extractions or movement operations). However, while distance is in itself not a constraint, there are a number of structures or constructions that to varying degrees hinder such long-distance dependencies. Since Ross (1967), the term "island" has been used to describe syntactic structures from which extraction is impossible or impeded, and the constraints on such dependencies have typically been assumed to be universal properties of language and to be innate, given the lack of negative evidence during language acquisition (see, e.g., Newmeyer 1991).

English has been the prototypical object of study in accounts trying to establish what is possible and impossible with respect to long-distance filler-gap dependencies, e.g., across clausal boundaries, and it is still ubiquitous in the literature on island structures. However, counterexamples in the Mainland Scandinavian languages were first brought to the attention of the linguistic community as early as the 1970s (Erteschik-Shir 1973; Engdahl and Ejerhed 1982), and had in fact been recorded by the Danish grammarian Kristian Mikkelsen almost a century before (Mikkelsen 1894, e.g., pp. 322, 442). Nonetheless, such counterexamples have repeatedly been dismissed as illusory and, instead, alternative accounts of the underlying structure of such cases have been proposed (e.g., Chomsky 1982; Kush et al. 2013).

In fact, extractions from island structures appear to be pervasive in spoken Mainland Scandinavian (Lindahl 2017; Nyvad et al. 2017), and recent experimental island research on Swedish (Müller 2019), Norwegian (Kush et al. 2018, 2019; Bondevik et al. 2020) and Danish (Christensen and Nyvad 2014) have found empirical evidence to suggest that adjunct clauses and relative clauses may not actually be strong (absolute) islands in these languages. This recent island research has highlighted the roles played by the matrix verb, information structure, and the faciliatory effect of a supporting context in the acceptability of extraction from island environments. In addition, recent research suggests that extraction from certain types of island structures in English might not be as unacceptable as previously assumed either (e.g., Müller 2019; Chaves and Putnam 2020; Sprouse et al. 2016). These findings break new empirical ground, question perceived knowledge, and may indeed have substantial ramifications for syntactic theory.

The purpose of this Special Issue is to provide an overview of the state-of-the-art research on island phenomena in English and the Mainland Scandinavian languages, as well any other languages where such island structures can be found. An explicit objective is to investigate how other languages compare to English with respect to the acceptability of extractions from island structures in order to shed light on the nature of the constraints on filler-gap dependencies and the syntactic primitives that form the basis of such structures.

Each of the ten contributions of this Special Issue play a part in highlighting the need to operationalize our tools for the investigation into the extra-syntactic factors that affect the acceptability of traditional island structures. However, each of the ten contributions approach island phenomena from a distinctive angle. While some take a more theoretical approach (Culicover et al. 2022; Kehl 2022), others provide new corpus data (Müller and

**Citation:** Nyvad, Anne Mette, and Ken Ramshøj Christensen. 2023. Recent Advances in Research on Island Phenomena. *Languages* 8: 16. https://doi.org/10.3390/ languages8010016

Received: 21 December 2022 Accepted: 22 December 2022 Published: 2 January 2023

**Copyright:** © 2023 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/).

#### Eggers 2022; Engdahl and Lindahl 2022) or new experimental data (Chaves 2022; Engdahl and Lindahl 2022; Kobzeva et al. 2022; Nyvad et al. 2022; Snyder 2022; Vincent et al. 2022).

In order to investigate the nature of island constraints in the Mainland Scandinavian languages, the Insular Scandinavian languages could be of special interest, since these languages share a number of typological and syntactic features, but appear to be different when it comes to the escapability of island environments. Along this line of reasoning, Engdahl and Lindahl (2022) argue that the extractions from relative clauses attested in the Mainland Scandinavian languages could conceivably be connected to the tendency in these languages to prepose unstressed object pronouns as a way of establishing coherent discourse. In order to test this hypothesis, they examine the extent to which pronoun preposing is employed in the Mainland Scandinavian language Swedish on the one hand, and the Insular Scandinavian languages Faroese and Icelandic on the other. Their findings suggest a connection between the frequency with which a language employs pronoun preposing in order to establish coherent discourse and the willingness of its speakers to accept long extractions. In addition, some Icelandic speakers appear to find extraction from complement clauses natural, but extraction from relative clauses (RC) unnatural, which suggests that there is a syntactic constraint blocking movement from RCs in Icelandic. While the Mainland Scandinavian languages seem to share a property facilitating long extraction, corpus data suggest that such extraction is not used productively in the Insular Scandinavian languages.

Building on these new insights about fronting conditions in Mainland and Insular Scandinavian languages, Lindahl (2022) examines extraction from relative clauses in Icelandic and Swedish in parallel with an acceptability judgment study in order to compare island structures when information structure and context are controlled for. She found substantial differences between the two languages: Participants judged extraction from relative clauses and embedded questions unacceptable in Icelandic, while these island structures were largely considered natural by Swedish speakers. In her data, there appears to be no cost of extraction in local fronting, extraction from complement clauses, or from 'existential/presentational' RCs, i.e., RCs embedded under existential or presentational main verbs, corresponding to, e.g., *be* or *know*. While extractions from RCs under semantically richer matrix predicates were generally considered less natural in Swedish, extraction from RCs was invariably unacceptable in Icelandic.

However, there is often a mismatch between informal and formal judgments. Island structures tend to receive relatively low scores in acceptability judgment studies, while highly acceptable examples are frequently attested in naturally occurring speech. As already mentioned, speakers of Mainland Scandinavian languages find at least some extractions from relative clauses and adjuncts acceptable, and the finding in Müller and Eggers (2022) is that this is matched in naturally occurring speech: island violations can be attested in corpora "at a non-trivial rate". The combined data from corpus and acceptability studies strongly suggest that extraction from relative clauses and adjunct clauses is possible in Danish, or at least that they are not the strong islands that they have traditionally been assumed to be. However, Müller and Eggers also found examples of extraction from RCs and adjunct clauses in English, albeit on a substantially smaller scale. In other words, the data suggest that the Mainland Scandinavian languages are more liberal than, e.g., English when it comes to island extraction, and that RCs and adjunct clauses may not be strong islands in English either. The data also show that extraction from RCs is not restricted to constructions involving existential/presentational matrix verbs, although there seems to be a strong preference (echoing Lindahl 2022). In addition, while relativization from RCs and adjunct clauses was attested in both English and Danish, none of the examples involve *wh*-extraction.

In Müller and Eggers (2022), extraction from adjunct clauses was most frequent from *if*-clauses and unattested from *because*-clauses in both Danish and English. These results echo the experimental results by Nyvad et al. (2022), who investigated the acceptability of relativization from three types of English finite adjunct clauses (headed by *if*, *when* and *because*) with a facilitating context and found a quite non-uniform pattern: extraction from *if*-clauses received unexpectedly high ratings, on a par with extraction from complement *that*-clauses, and significantly higher than extraction from *when*- and *because*-clauses. The authors interpret these results as suggesting that adjunct clauses are not invariably strong islands in English and that extra-syntactic factors must be key in understanding the variation in these island phenomena.

Similarly, Vincent et al. (2022) argue that English is more like the Mainland Scandinavian languages than previously thought. It has been suggested that island constraints need to be parameterized in order to account for cross-linguistic differences, but a substantial part of the research presented in this Special Issue suggests that island extraction appears to be facilitated in similar environments across the languages under investigation. This conclusion is also reached in Vincent et al. (2022), based on experimental data indicating that extraction from a relative clause is possible or at least more acceptable in English in environments and contexts where an existential, non-presuppositional interpretation of the DP containing the relative clause is supported.

Kobzeva et al. (2022) examine extractability in Norwegian. They used an acceptability judgment task to test relativization and *wh*-extraction from nominal subjects, embedded questions, conditional adjunct clauses, and existential relative clauses in Norwegian. The results reveal different effects for different dependency types across the island environments, as *wh*-extraction from embedded questions and conditional adjunct clauses induce small but significant island effects, while the corresponding relativizations do not. They interpret the results as calling for a fine-grained account of factors influencing the acceptability of island extractions that goes beyond the basic division between focus and background, as suggested by Abeillé et al. (2020).

Culicover et al. (2022) propose the Extended Radical Unacceptability Hypothesis (ERUH) for extraction phenomena and argue that the reduced acceptability found in locally well-formed structures are not created by violations of syntactic constraints, but rather by non-syntactic factors. They assume that prior exposure leads to the emergence of probabilistic expectations that can be described as symbolic local well-formedness conditions (LWFCs), and that the level of acceptability is related to the degree of surprisal triggered by a linguistic form, such that low surprisal corresponds to high acceptability and vice versa. Hence, they argue, the unacceptability of classical island structures may just be a reflection of the level of surprisal that they yield, and what has been described as syntactic island constraints are in fact simply generalizations concerning the structures that produce a high level of surprisal related to their frequency. The frequency with which a given construction occurs is affected by both processing factors and information structure mismatches. A problem for non-syntactic accounts is the cross-linguistic variation that we see in terms of island strength. Culicover et al. suggest that the variation is the result of differences in construction frequencies.

In a similar vein, Kehl (2022) argues that it may not be necessary to make syntactic operations sensitive to semantic factors in accounts of participial adjunct islands. According to him, theory development in the realm of syntax should take into account relative acceptability differences in the underlying declaratives before positing licensing mechanisms for interrogative island structures. The declarative structures have traditionally been viewed as grammatical in a binary, categorical sense, and as such, "[d]ifferences in processing complexity, semantic compatibility and pragmatic characteristics" of the declaratives have not been taken into account in the comparison with the interrogative counterparts when it comes to island structures, but acceptability differences in the declarative constructions might explain at least some of the variation found in the extraction counterparts. Kehl argues that among the factors that may play a role in acceptability variation are transitivity, event structure of the main verb, and the encoding of an incremental measure scale in the matrix predicate.

Snyder (2000) presented experimental evidence that syntactic satiation can be induced for certain island structures. That is, speakers find such sentences more acceptable as a function of repeated exposure. This is notable, given that satiation effects can potentially help shed light on the fundamental questions relating to the nature of island constraints in particular and the nature of our internal grammars in general. In this Special Issue, Snyder (2022) presents three new studies indicating (i) that only a subset of sentence types satiates, (ii) that the satiation of one sentence type may affect other syntactically related sentence types, and (iii) that satiable sentence types vary in terms of the number of exposures required in order for acceptability to increase. Finally, it is shown that experimentally induced satiation may persist over a certain period of time. Snyder (2022) concludes by suggesting that satiation can be used as a diagnostic test in that the underlying principle leading to initial unacceptability in different sentence types may not be the same if they differ in their behavior in terms of satiability.

Chaves (2022) points out that it is still unclear what the precise nature of syntactic satiation is, i.e., whether it is task adaptation, syntactic adaptation, or both. He stresses that certain island structures may combine categorical (competence) effects and contextual or expectation-based (performance) factors, which may be difficult to separate. However, across studies, it has been found that coordinate structure violations, subject islands, adjunct islands, factive islands, and RCs share a common property in being more acceptable when the construction expresses an assertion, rather than backgrounded or non-at-issue content. In addition to complexity and plausibility as important factors in gradient acceptability, Chaves (2022) presents a new factor that may also play a role in the adaptation to islands and other complex constructions, namely "predicted reward" (i.e., some sort of bonus for accurate performance in an experiment). Based on new experimental data, he suggests that the variation found when it comes to research on satiation effects may be due to differences in motivation and focus among the participants, something which may be manipulated in future research on islands.

In conclusion, based on mounting evidence, and not least the data and analyses presented in this Special Issue, English and the Mainland Scandinavian languages may be more similar when it comes to island phenomena than previously assumed. Across these languages, extraction seems to increase in acceptability (to varying degrees) when the matrix predicate is existential or presentational, when facilitated by context, when the embedded structure is asserted, or when the dependency type is relativization (or topicalization) rather than *wh*-movement. Furthermore, syntactic constraints on extraction, such as the Condition on Extraction Domain (CED, Huang 1982) and the Complex NP Constraint (CNPC, Ross 1967) may need to be re-evaluated, as recent studies have found a wide variation in acceptability that may not prima facie be easily compatible with a binary constraint in core syntax. While little doubt remains that it is more difficult to extract from some domains than others, whether these patterns are the result of competence or performance factors is still an open question.

**Author Contributions:** Writing—orginal draft, A.M.N. Writing—review and editing, A.M.N. and K.R.C. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.

**Funding:** This work was funded by the Independent Research Fund Denmark (grant ID: DFF-9062- 00047B).

**Conflicts of Interest:** The authors declare no conflict of interest.

#### **References**

Abeillé, Anne, Barbara Hemforth, Elodie Winckel, and Edward Gibson. 2020. Extraction from Subjects: Differences in Acceptability Depend on the Discourse Function of the Construction. *Cognition* 204: 104293. [CrossRef] [PubMed]

Bondevik, Ingrid, Dave Kush, and Terje Lohndal. 2020. Variation in Adjunct Islands: The Case of Norwegian. *Nordic Journal of Linguistics* 44: 223–54. [CrossRef]

Chaves, Rui P. 2022. Sources of Discreteness and Gradience in Island Effects. *Languages* 7: 245. [CrossRef]


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## *Article* **Extraction and Pronoun Preposing in Scandinavian**

**Elisabet Engdahl 1,***<sup>∗</sup>* **and Filippa Lindahl 1,2**


**Abstract:** It has been noted that examples with extractions out of relative clauses that have been attested in Danish, Norwegian and Swedish are judged to be unacceptable in Icelandic and Faroese. We hypothesize that this may reflect whether or not speakers tend to prepose unstressed object pronouns as a way of establishing a coherent discourse. In this article we investigate to what extent pronoun preposing is used in Swedish, Icelandic and Faroese and whether there is any correlation with the acceptabilty of extractions from relative clauses. We show that Icelandic speakers use pronoun preposing to a very limited extent whereas Faroese speakers often prepose the VP or sentential anaphor *tað*. In both languages extraction from relative clauses is mainly judged to be unacceptable, with Faroese speakers being somewhat more accepting of extraction from presentational relatives. A crucial factor seems to be whether preposing is associated with a marked, contrastive interpretation or not.

**Keywords:** preposing; topicalization; Faroese; Icelandic; Swedish; contrastive topic; continued topic; VP ellipsis

#### **1. Introduction**

At least since Ross' dissertation (Ross 1967), linguists have been trying to characterize the restrictions on extractions in natural languages. Ross showed that many types of extractions could be subsumed under a structural constraint, the so called *Complex NP Constraint* CNPC, which prohibited extraction out of a clause dominated by a noun phrase. The CNPC was soon subsumed under *subjacency* (Chomsky 1973) and in the following years, a number of proposals were made for what the relevant bounding nodes were in different languages in order to account for the cross-linguistic variation that was found (see, e.g., Rizzi 1990; Taraldsen 1981). However, soon Scandinavian speaking linguists such as Erteschik-Shir (1973); Andersson (1975) and Allwood (1976) pointed out that certain extractions out of relative clauses were possible in the mainland Scandinavian languages Danish, Norwegian and Swedish. In the following years several linguists approached this topic from different perspectives (see, e.g., the papers in Engdahl and Ejerhed 1982). When written and spoken corpora became available, studies based on spontaneously produced written or spoken extractions started to appear see, e.g., (Engdahl 1997; Jensen 2002; Lindahl 2010, 2011, 2017b).

The documented spontaneous extractions mainly come from mainland Scandinavian whereas the insular Scandinavian languages Faroese and Icelandic appear to behave more similar to English when it comes to extractions from relative clauses (Platzack 2014; Thráinsson 2007; Thráinsson et al. 2004; Zaenen 1985). There have been occasional reports of spontaneous extractions from relative clauses in English (see, e.g., Chung and McCloskey 1983; McCawley 1981) <sup>1</sup> and similar examples are reported by Cinque (2013) to be at least marginally acceptable in Italian, French, and Spanish. However, they do not seem to be used productively the way they are in mainland Scandinavian, see the recent corpus investigations in Kush et al. (2021) and Müller and Eggers (2022). This suggests that the mainland Scandinavian languages have some common property which facilitates long extractions. In this article we explore the hypothesis that the common property that sets

**Citation:** Engdahl, Elisabet, and Filippa Lindahl. 2022. Extraction and Pronoun Preposing in Scandinavian. *Languages* 7: 128. https://doi.org/ 10.3390/languages7020128

Academic Editors: Anne Mette Nyvad and Ken Ramshøj Christensen

Received: 4 March 2022 Accepted: 10 May 2022 Published: 23 May 2022

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**Copyright:** © 2022 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/).

the mainland Scandinavian languages apart is the tendency to use *preposing* (*topicalization*) of unstressed pronouns as a way of connecting utterances in spoken language as well as sentences in texts.2 We test this hypothesis by comparing how pronoun preposing is used in spoken Swedish, a mainland Scandinavian language, with similar data from the insular languages Icelandic and Faroese. In this article we bring together results from previous studies that we have carried out on individual languages and apply an explicit comparative perspective.

We start in Section 2 by looking at what characterizes spontaneous extractions from relative clauses in Swedish. Since a large proportion of them involve pronouns, we turn, in Section 3, to the question how pronoun preposing is used more generally in Swedish and what similarities there are between local preposing (within a clause), long preposing (from an embedded clause) and what is often called extraction (long preposing from a relative clause). In Section 4, we look at preposing and extraction in Icelandic and in Section 5 we present relevant data from Faroese. In Section 6, we look briefly at the ways preposing is used in English, German and Dutch before evaluating our hypothesis in Section 7.

#### **2. What Do Spontaneous Extractions Look Like?**

The literature on extractions from relative clauses is largely based on constructed examples—not surprising given that most of the studies deal with languages where such extractions are not used in ordinary conversations. It is clearly a good idea to start from the types of extractions from relative clauses that are actually used. Engdahl (1997) looked at 30 naturally occurring extractions in Swedish, both written and spoken. Some examples from this article are given in (1). We mark the relative clause and the gap site of the extracted element.


called.' (novel 1996)

In (1a,b) the pronoun *det* 'it' has been preposed from a relative clause which modifies the indefinite pivot in an existential sentence; we refer to this construction as a *presentational relative*, see Lambrecht (1988) and Chaves and Putnam (2020, p. 27).<sup>3</sup> In (1c) a short deictic adverb *där* 'there' has been preposed from a *have*-construction which is very similar to presentational sentences (Keenan 1987; McCawley 1981). (1d) is a cleft construction where the object *tapeterna* 'the wall paper' has been preposed from a cleft clause; the clefted constituent *Sven* is definite. (1e) is a relative clause where the relativized item *namn* 'name' has been extracted from a relative clause which modifies the object of the lexical verb *känna* 'be acquainted with'.

These types of constructions, preposing out of presentational relatives or cleft constructions and preposing or relativization from an embedded relative, were most common in

Engdahl's (1997) sample.<sup>4</sup> There were a few examples involving preposing of a *wh*-phrase; they all had the form in (2) which resembles a cleft.

(2) vem1 *who* var *was* det EXPL ingen *nobody* [som *[that* kände *knew* <sup>1</sup> ?] 'Who did nobody know?' (spoken)

This is not surprising given that *wh*-questions in Swedish often are clefted with the clefted constituent preposed, as in (3) (Brandtler 2019).

(3) vem1 *who* var *was* det EXPL <sup>1</sup> [som *[that* kom?] *came* 'Who came?'

In (2), the clefted constituent remains in situ and *vem* is linked to a position inside the cleft clause.5

The relative rareness of spontaneous examples with preposed *wh*-phrases fits well with the experimental findings in Kush et al. (2018); Kush et al. (2019) and the corpus studies in Müller and Eggers (2022).

The majority of Engdahl's examples involved extractions out of relative clauses where the subject has been relativized, as in the examples shown so far. There were also a few cleft examples with object relatives, as in (4).

(4) matte1 *maths* var *was* det EXPL bara *only* pappa2 *dad* [jag *I* kunde *could* fråga *ask* <sup>2</sup> om *about* 1] 'It was only dad that I could ask about maths.'

In some of the examples the preposed phrase was a lexical DP, as in (1d) and (4), but a large proportion of Engdahl's examples involved either an anaphoric pronoun, as in (1a,b), or a light adverb, as in (1c). Engdahl showed that preposing of unstressed pronouns in Swedish is used as a way of establishing a coherent discourse and suggested that this might be what distinguishes the mainland Scandinavian languages from other languages, essentially the hypothesis that we are testing in this article. In the next section we look first at local preposing in Swedish and then return to extractions from relative clauses.

#### **3. Swedish**

The type of preposing of pronouns that we have seen in (1a,b,c) is of course not only found in extraction sentences. Local preposing, in the same clause, of object pronouns is quite common in spoken and written Swedish, as well as in Danish and Norwegian. In this section, we present data from Swedish but similar data are found in Danish and Norwegian, see Engdahl and Lindahl (2014).

#### *3.1. Pronoun Preposing*

Starting an utterance with a pronoun is very common in spoken language and Swedish is no exception to this. In most cases the pronoun functions as the subject of the sentence but in the mainland Scandinavian languages it is quite common to start with an object pronoun, or a subject pronoun from an embedded clause.6 In order to find out when this word order is used, we have conducted several studies using the *Nordic Dialect Corpus (NDC)* (Johannessen et al. 2009) which contains recordings and aligned transcriptions of informal conversations in all the Nordic languages (Lindahl and Engdahl Forthcoming).7

The Swedish part of the *NDC* consists of 361 184 words, produced by 133 speakers in 37 locations. Consider the following examples, taken from the *NDC*. We identify the interviewer by *int* and the speakers by *s1, s2*, etc. The antecedent of the pronoun is underlined and the preposed pronoun is italicized. (.) marks a short pause, and = that the speaker continues on the next line.

(5) a. *int:* men *but* eh *eh* hann *had time* du *you* gå i skolan *go in school.*DEF nånting *anything* då? PART int: 'However, did you have time to go to school at all?' b. *s1:* jo *yes det*<sup>1</sup> *it* fick *got* man *one* ju PART göra *do* 1 s1: 'Yes, one had to, of course' (6) a. *s1:* dessa *these* två *two* de *they* hade *had* (.) de hade slagits *they had fought* (.) där *down* nere= *there* s1: 'These two, they had been fighting down there' b. *s1:* och *and det*<sup>1</sup> *it* tyckte *thought* vi *we* [ <sup>1</sup> var *was* väldigt *very* spännande *exciting* ]

s1: 'and we thought it was very exciting.'

In both (5) and (6), the preposed element is the third person singular neuter pronoun *det* 'it'. In (5) the pronoun acts as a *VP anaphor* which refers to the action *gå i skolan* 'go to school', expressed as a VP in the interviewer's question.<sup>8</sup> In (6) *det* is a propositional anaphor, referring to the event just described by the sentence *de hade slagits* 'they had been fighting'. Here *det* has been preposed from an embedded clause. In both utterances, *det* was unstressed.

Preposing of VP and propositional anaphors, as in (5) and (6), is very common in the NDC but there are also examples with a preposed pronoun which refers to a recently mentioned entity, as in (7) (somewhat abbreviated).

	- a. *s1: den*<sup>1</sup> *it* köpte *bought* jag *I* <sup>1</sup> 1980 *1980*

s1: 'I bought it in 1980.'

Here the pronoun *den* agrees in gender and number with the antecedent *bil*, which is the only likely referent. The pronoun is unstressed. If it had been stressed, it would have been understood as a demonstrative, *that*, but this interpretation would not have been plausible in this context. Unstressed *den* and *det* are interpreted as personal pronouns whereas the stressed versions function as distal demonstrative pronouns (Faarlund 2019, p. 27).<sup>9</sup> We gloss the unstressed occurrences as 'it' and the stressed ones as 'that'. As we will show in Section 6.1, this type of non-contrastive preposing is hardly used in English.

In (Lindahl and Engdahl Forthcoming) we investigated how preposing of pronouns is used in the Swedish part of the *NDC*. We found that in a large majority of cases the preposed pronoun referred back to something that was newly introduced, an action as in (5), an event as in (6), or an entity, as in (8a). Following Erteschik-Shir (2007) we refer to this pattern as *focus chaining* since the antecedent is (part of) the relational focus of the preceding utterance, i.e., the new information that is asserted or questioned about the topic (Gundel and Fretheim 2004, p. 177). There were also cases where the antecedent of the preposed pronoun was the topic of the preceding utterance, often realized as a subject. This kind of *topic chaining* was mainly found when the antecedent was an entity, as in (8b) (we just provide the English version of the interviewer's question).

(8) *int:* Are you in touch with anyone who did their military service with you?

*s1:* ja *yes* (.) det *there* var *were* två stycken andra plutonsjukvårdare= *two stycken other paramedics*

a. *dom they* var *were* från *from* Fagersta= *Fagersta*

b. så *so dom*<sup>1</sup> *them* har *have* jag *I* ganska *pretty* bra *good* kontakt *contact* med *with* 1

s1:'Yes, there were two other paramedics. They were from Fagersta, s1: so I have pretty good contacts with them.'

The first occurrence of *dom* 'they' in (8a) is an instance of focus chaining. Once *dom* is realized as a subject, it becomes the topic of that utterance. Consequently the second *dom* in (8b) is in a topic chain.

In the examples shown above the preposed pronouns are unstressed. There are also examples where an initial pronoun is stressed and receives a contrastive interpretation, as in (9).

	- *s1:* ja *yes* nä *no DET*<sup>1</sup> *that* vill *want* jag *I* inte *not* ha *have* <sup>1</sup> vet *know* du *you*

s1:'No, THAT I do not want, you know.'

By stressing the pronoun and negating the utterance, the speaker emphasizes that he definitely does not want contact lenses.

We found that preposing of pronouns is primarily used in contexts where the antecedent and the pronoun formed a focus chain or a topic chain. In 85% of the investigated cases, the pronoun was locally preposed and in 15% we had long preposing from a subordinate clause, as in (6). One effect of the preposing is that the initial pronoun is interpreted as the *aboutness topic* of the utterance (Reinhart 1981) which we can show using Reinhart's rewriting test. We here apply the test to *s1's* utterance in (8b).

(10) a. *s1* said about *them* (the two paramedics) that he had pretty good contacts with them.

The paraphrase (10) works well and we have a good indication that the preposed *dom* in (8b) acts as the aboutness topic for that utterance.

When it comes to relative frequency of object preposing in spoken Swedish, Jörgensen (1976) showed that this varies with the type of spoken interaction. Based on the material in *Talbanken*<sup>10</sup> he found 14% object initial sentences in interviews, and 9% in conversations and debates (Jörgensen 1976, p. 103). In a more recent study the second author investigated the word order patterns in the Swedish part of the *NDC*, Lindahl (under review). To obtain an unbiased sample, 1000 sentences were extracted from the corpus with the only criterion being that the sentence should have a finite verb. The sentences were manually investigated and all declarative main clauses, 712 in total, were further analyzed. In total, 46 of the sentences in that sample, or 6.5%, had a preposed object and of these, 36 were pronominal (see Table 1 in Section 4.1).

Studies of spoken Swedish show that starting a sentence with *det* is the most common pattern and in most cases it functions as an expletive subject (Allwood 1999; Engdahl 2012). In Engdahl and Lindahl (2014) where we specifically looked for preposed object pronouns (including subject pronouns from embedded clauses), 95% of the hits were *det*. The reason for this is that preposing of VP anaphors or propositional anaphors is by far more common than preposing of pronouns with entity antecedents. Mikkelsen (2015) claims that preposing of VP anaphors is actually obligatory in Danish whereas we argue that there is a strong preference for preposing in Swedish but not a grammatical constraint, Lindahl and Engdahl (Forthcoming). According to Bentzen and Anderssen (2019), preposing of VP and propositional anaphors is always an option in Norwegian.11

#### *3.2. Extraction from Relative Clauses*

As already mentioned, the first author's investigation was limited to 30 authentic examples (Engdahl 1997). For her dissertation, the second author carried out a larger empirical study of extraction from relative clauses in Swedish based on a collection of 270 spontaneous examples, gathered between 2011 and 2016 (Lindahl 2017b). The collection contained 101 spoken examples from everyday conversations, 60 from radio and television, and 109 written examples.<sup>12</sup>

In a representative subset of the spoken preposing examples (Sample B), slightly over half of the examples, 56%, involved preposed pronouns. Just as in the examples with local preposing, the pronouns extracted from relative clauses typically refer back to something which has just been uttered, either by the same speaker or by an interlocutor. The extracted pronouns are thus part of a focus or a topic chain which connects the utterance to the preceding context. A few examples are given in (11)–(13). For space reasons, the preceding context is sometimes given only in English.

(11) men *but* ingen *none* av *of* dom *them* är *are* ju PRT varmblodiga *warm-blooded* (.) *det*<sup>1</sup> *it* finns *is* det EXPL inga *no* insekter *insects* [ som *that* är *are* 1]

'However, none of them are warm-blooded, there are no insects that are.' (Lindahl 2017b, p. 1)

(12) *s1:* The text was rather small.

*s2:* ja *yes* men *but det*<sup>1</sup> *it* var *was* det EXPL ingen *no one* [som *[that* klagade *complained* på *about* 1] ser *see* du *you*

s2:'Yes, but no one complained about it, you know.' (Lindahl 2017b, p. 77)

(13) den allra största delen av befolkningen, *the biggest part of population.*DEF*,* bönderna, *farmers.*DEF*, den*<sup>1</sup> *[it* var *was* det EXPL adeln *nobility.*DEF [som *that* hade *had* domsrätt *jurisdiction* över *over* 1]

'It was the nobility that had the jurisdiction over the largest part of the population, the farmers.' (Radio Sweden, 2015) (Lindahl 2017b, p. 91)

These examples resemble the ones shown in Section 2 from Engdahl (1997). Regarding (11) and (12), these are examples of presentational relatives, cf. (1abc), and (13) is a cleft construction, cf. (1d). This example also illustrates a common use of pronoun preposing in Swedish, namely in *left dislocation* where the initial topic is resumed by a preposed agreeing pronoun, see Holmberg (2020) and Lindahl and Engdahl (Forthcoming) for discussion.

The next two examples involve the lexical main verbs *veta* 'know' and *störa sig på* 'be annoyed at'. In (14), the speaker is talking about driving across the US.


*det*<sup>1</sup> *it* stör *annoy* jag *I* mej *me* på *on* folk *people* [som *that* säger *say* 1 ]

'People who say that annoy me.' (Lindahl 2017b, p. 89)

In Lindahl's Sample B, 74% were presentational relatives, 8% were clefts such as (13) and 13% were constructions with lexical verbs.13 In many of the presentational relatives, the relative clauses are short and contain just a finite auxiliary verb, as in (11), or the support verb *göra* 'do', as in (14). These short relative clauses help to identify or restrict the head of the relative clause. Together with the matrix, the head DP and the relative clause must form a coherent comment on the extracted item which is *relevant* in the sense of Grice (1975).14

We end this overview of extraction from relative clauses by noting that Swedish speakers have been using such constructions for a long time. In a guide to *Proper Swedish*, Wellander (1939) discusses the fact that Swedish speakers say things such as (16).15

(16) *Det*<sup>1</sup> *that* hade *had* jag *I* aldrig *never* träffat *met* någon *someone* [som *[that* hade *had* gjort *done* 1]. 'I had never met anyone who had done that.' (Lindahl 2017b, p. 28)

#### *3.3. Summary*

In this section, we have shown that the use conditions for extraction of pronouns from relative clauses are the same as for local and non-local pronoun preposing in Swedish.16 The pronouns are typically part of focus or topic chains; they refer to an event, a property or an entity that has either just been introduced or is already established as a topic. This resembles a well-known strategy for cohesion in discourse, namely to start with a subject pronoun which is part of an anaphoric chain with some element in the preceding utterance (Daneš 1974; Erteschik-Shir 2007). What seems to be special about speakers of Swedish and the other mainland Scandinavian languages is that they use this strategy also for non-subject pronouns, as becomes clear when we look at spontaneous conversations. By preposing a pronoun in a focus or topic chain, the speaker ensures that it will be understood as the aboutness topic for the upcoming utterance. This may in turn explain why preposing the VP or propositional anaphor *det*, as in (5) and (6), is especially common. By doing so the speaker signals that *det*'s antecedent is what the sentence is about.

We noted earlier that preposed pronouns in Swedish are often unstressed; when a pronoun is stressed, it often invokes contrast and the presence of alternatives, see (9). Lexical DPs can also be preposed or extracted (44% in Lindahl's Sample B). These always carry stress and normally invoke alternatives.<sup>17</sup>

#### **4. Icelandic**

When Icelandic is mentioned in connection with extractions from relative clauses, it is mainly to establish that such extractions are ungrammatical (Thráinsson 2007; Zaenen 1985). There are no reports of spontaneous extractions in Icelandic in the literature. According to our hypothesis, this might indicate that preposing is not used as a method for establishing cohesion in the discourse. We start by investigating local pronoun preposing in spoken Icelandic and then turn to extractions from relative clauses.

#### *4.1. Pronoun Preposing*

Observations of informal conversations between Icelanders give the impression that they use preposing of pronouns much more seldom than Danes, Norwegians or Swedes. In order to investigate whether this impression is correct, we looked at the Icelandic part of the *NDC* (94 338 token, 48 speakers). We found a few examples of object preposing, all of which involve the pronoun *það* 'it, that', as shown in (17) and (18).18

	- b. *s2: það*<sup>1</sup> *that* gerum *do* við *we* 1 1 *það*<sup>1</sup> *that* gerum *do* við *we* strákarnir *boys.*PL.DEF.NOM <sup>1</sup> sko PRT

'We do, me and the boys do, you know.'19

	- b. *s2: það*<sup>1</sup> *that* vissi *knew* ég *I* ekki *not* 1 *s2:* 'I didn't know that.'

In (17) the preposed *það* is a VP anaphor and in (18) *það* refers back to a proposition, the new information just conveyed.<sup>20</sup> They resemble the Swedish examples we saw in (5) and (6) and are both examples of focus chaining.

This type of preposing of *það* can also be found in written Icelandic and is judged to be natural by many speakers in the acceptability study reported in Lindahl (2022). However, there are no examples of preposed pronouns with entity antecedents in the *NDC* and when asked about such examples, Icelanders tend to supply a contrastive context, see (19) from Engdahl and Lindahl (2014), provided by Halldór Ármann Sigurðsson.

(19) *A:* Have you seen Olaf?

*B:* nei *no hann*<sup>1</sup> *him* hef *have* ég *I* ekki *not* séð *seen* 1 í *in* allan *all* dag *day* B: en *but* ég *I* sá *saw* konuna *wife* hans *his* núna *now* rétt *right* aðan *before* B: svo *so* að *that* hann *he* hlýtur *must* að *to* vera *be* hérna *here* einhvers *some* staðar *where*

B:'No, I have not seen him all day, but I saw his wife just now so he must be somewhere around here.'

The referent *Olaf* is newly introduced in A's question so this is also a case of focus chaining. Note that B contrasts *hann* 'him' with *konuna hans* 'his wife'. This suggests that preposing of entity pronouns is mainly used when the referent is contrasted with some other element.21

The impression that object preposing is not very common in Icelandic is confirmed in Lindahl (under review). Using the same method as described for Swedish in Section 3.1, Lindahl extracted 1000 utterances with a finite verb in the Icelandic part of the *NDC* and then investigated all declarative main clauses in the sample.<sup>22</sup> Lindahl categorized the initial constituents in this sample and found substantial differences with respect to the comparable Swedish sample. These are summarized in Table 1.


**Table 1.** Grammatical function of phrases in the prefield in NDC, from Lindahl (under review).

First we note that the proportion of subject initial utterances was much larger in Icelandic, 75.2% compared to 59.1%, whereas preposing of adverbials was more common in Swedish. Verb initial (V1) declaratives, was somewhat more common in Icelandic than in Swedish. As for preposing of objects, there were actually no unambiguous examples with a preposed object in this random sample of Icelandic utterances, compared to 46 in the Swedish sample. We interpret this as an indication that object preposing is not a particularly common strategy in spoken Icelandic.

#### *4.2. Extraction from Relative Clauses*

As mentioned in the Introduction, extraction from relative clauses in Icelandic is considered to be ungrammatical (Thráinsson 2007; Zaenen 1985). However, since these articles only mention examples with extracted lexical DPs, an interesting question is whether Icelandic speakers accept the types of extractions that are found in Swedish (see Section 3.2) even if they do not produce them spontaneously. The second author reports on such a study in Lindahl (2022). In two parallel acceptability studies, speakers of Swedish and Icelandic were asked to rate sentences with extractions, using examples similar to the spontaneously produced ones from mainland Scandinavian we have seen in this article. The extracted phrases used in all of the test sentences were *það* in Icelandic and *det* in Swedish, and they all had sentential or VP antecedents. The participants were asked to rate examples such as (20), using the scale natural, somewhat strange and unnatural.

(20) Þú *you* getur *can* notað *use* gjafakortið *voucher.*DEF til *to* að *to* kaupa *buy* bíómiða *movie ticket* og *and það*<sup>1</sup> *that* eru *are* margir *many* [ sem *who* gera *do* 1]. 'You can use the voucher to buy a movie ticket, and there are many people who do.'

In brief, Lindahl found that extraction from relative clauses was rated very poorly in the Icelandic part of the study, and clearly much worse than the parallel Swedish examples. Local preposing was judged to be natural by two thirds of the participants. Long preposing from an *að*-clause received mixed ratings, but was rated worse than good fillers. In Swedish, preposing from *att*-clauses was rated on a par with good fillers. As for extraction from relative clauses, the Icelandic speakers found extraction unnatural in all of the test sentences, regardless of the type of relative clause. The Swedish speakers rated test items with a presentational relative clause as natural sounding more often than those items which contained a lexical verb. The study thus confirms previous reports that extraction from relative clauses is not acceptable in Icelandic.

#### *4.3. Summary*

Preposing of the VP or propositional anaphor *það* is sometimes used in Icelandic, primarily in local clauses, in a way that resembles the Swedish pattern, albeit much less frequently. However, when pronouns with entity antecedents are preposed, they reportedly receive a contrastive interpretation, just as in English (see Section 6.1). The low occurrence of preposed pronominal objects in Icelandic suggests that preposing is not used as a natural way of connecting utterances in the same way as in mainland Scandinavian. Since extraction from relative clauses seems to be unacceptable, we think this supports our hypothesis that there is a connection between using pronoun preposing as a way of connecting utterances and a willingness to accept long extractions. The study reported in Lindahl (2022) confirms that there is indeed a difference between Icelandic and Swedish in how long preposing of anaphoric pronouns is judged—such preposings are rated as natural more often in Swedish than in Icelandic, in line with our hypothesis. In addition, Lindahl found a clear effect of clause type in Icelandic. While a substantial part of the Icelandic participants rated long preposing from *að*-clauses as natural, even though such preposings are not common in spoken Icelandic, they did not do so for extraction from relative clauses. This suggests that there is also a structural constraint which blocks extraction from relative clauses in Icelandic.

#### **5. Faroese**

Turning to Faroese, very little is known about possible uses of pronoun preposing in Faroese and extraction from relative clauses has not been discussed much in previous research, apart from when it is pointed out that it is unacceptable (Platzack 2014; Thráinsson et al. 2004).

#### *5.1. Pronoun Preposing*

In the Faroese part of the *NDC* (64803 tokens from 20 speakers) there are more than a hundred examples with a preposed *tað* 'it, that', pronounced /tæ/, including the two following examples.

	- b. *s2:* ja *yes* (.) veitst *know* tú *you* hvat *what tað*<sup>1</sup> *that* havi *have* eg *I* faktiskt *actually* 1

'Do you know what, I actually have.'

(22) altso *PRT* tað er ordiliga hugnaligt *it [[is [[really [[nice* [*tað*<sup>1</sup> *[it* haldi *think* eg *I* 1 'It's really nice, I think so.'

In (21) *tað* is a VP anaphor and in (22) *tað* refers back to a proposition. There are notably fewer preposed pronouns with entity antecedents, as in (23).

(23) Carl Johan Jensen *Carl Johan Jensen* hann *he* eg *I* veit *know* at *that* hann *he* er *is* rithøvundur *author* (.) *hann*<sup>1</sup> veit eg einki um 1

*him know I nothing about*

'Carl Johan Jensen, I know he is an author. I do not know anything about him.'

Since there is so little data available on spoken Faroese, the second author carried out a controlled production study in Faroese.<sup>23</sup> The study took advantage of the fact that practically all Faroese speakers know Danish well; Danish is taught in schools from third grade and used frequently in the society. In the study, 91 native Faroese speakers were asked to translate Danish sentences into Faroese. 82 of the participants were high school students, and 9 were between 38 and 69 years at the time. The Danish sentences were chosen so as to resemble spoken dialogue.

An example of the task is shown in (24). Each sentence was given in a context, also in Danish, which the participants could choose to translate if they wanted to. In the examples below, we have underlined the antecedent and italicized the pronoun, but this was not performed in the experiment.

(24) Anna *Anna* spurgte *asked* os, *us* hvad klokken var, *what clock.*DEF *was* men *but det*<sup>1</sup> *it* vidste *knew* vi *we* ikke *not* 1. (Da.)

'Anna asked us what time it was but we did not know.'

The Faroese speakers had no difficulties in translating this example. Their answers varied, as shown in (25). The percentages to the right indicate how often the participants used this word order in their translations.24


In this example, the preposed *det* in the Danish version is a propositional anaphor. The Faroese participants all translated it using *tað* and in 82% of the answers they preposed it. The same tendency showed up in examples where a VP anaphor was preposed from an embedded *at*-clause. The Danish original is shown in (26) and in (27) we give the relevant parts of the Faroese translations of the example.

(26) Hvis *if* jeg *I* ikke *not* tager *take* fejl, *error* og *and det*<sup>1</sup> *that* tror *think* jeg *I* ikke, *not* at *that* jeg *I* gør *do* 1, har *has* Ole *Ole* satt *put* kagen *cake.*DEF i *in* køleskabet. *fridge.*DEF (Da.)

'If I'm not mistaken, and I do not think I am, Ole has put the cake in the fridge.'


In total, 92% of the Faroese participants translated the Danish sentence using a preposing strategy, either a local or long preposing of *tað* or relativization with *sum*. However, when the Danish sentence contained a preposed entity pronoun as in (28), the Faroese participants preferred a different strategy.


'I was at my brother's yesterday. He lives close to me, so I see them often.'


For this example, only 20% of the Faroese translations replicate the preposing from the Danish original. Instead, most participants chose to start with the subject as in (29b,c). In total, 19% of the translations used an alternative formulation with a reciprocal form of the verb, as in (29c). The Faroese speakers' preference for avoiding preposing was even more pronounced when the Danish original involved long preposing of an entity pronoun from an *at*-clause.



Only 4% of the translations replicated the preposing of an entity pronoun. The Faroese participants clearly preferred to leave the pronoun in the verb phrase or leave it out. Given the different strategies used by the Faroese participants, it seems that preposing of the VP or propositional anaphor *tað* is a common strategy in Faroese, but it does not extend to entity pronouns.

There are both advantages and disadvantages with using a translation method. It can be a useful method for finding examples that are hard to locate in corpora and it can elicit natural sounding Faroese exchanges, especially if the materials to be translated come from natural dialogue. One disadvantage is that participants may transfer some aspects of the Danish originals into Faroese. However, when the Faroese translations deviate from the Danish originals, this is most likely an indication that the participants do not recognize this as an acceptable word order in Faroese. For example, only a few of the translations retained the preposed word order when the pronoun referred to an entity, see (29a) and (31a).

As for the frequency of object preposing, we can get at least an idea about it from a smaller sample of 300 sentences from the Faroese part of the *NDC*. The sample contained 192 declarative main clauses, and out of these, 15 started with a preposed object, in 12 cases *tað*, which was the only pronoun found. Although the material is smaller, the rate of object preposing, 7.8%, is comparable to what Lindahl found using the same type of search in Swedish, 6.5%, see Table 1. Object preposing thus seems to be fairly common in spoken Faroese and definitely more common than in Icelandic.

#### *5.2. Extraction from Relative Clauses*

According to the literature, extraction from relative clauses is not acceptable in Faroese. Platzack (2014) gives the following example, which is a translation of a Swedish example in Allwood (1976).

(32) \* *Slíkar* [*such blómur*<sup>1</sup> *flowers* kenni *know* eg *I* ein *a* mann *man* [ sum *who* selur *sells* <sup>1</sup> ] (Fa)

However, we have noticed a handful examples in Faroese newspapers, two of which are shown here.

(33) Tað *it* ber *bears* eisini *also* til *to* at *to* koma *come* til *to* viðgerð *treatment* saman *together* við *with* fyrrverandi *former* makanum, *spouse.*SG.DEF og *and tað*<sup>1</sup> *that* eru *are* tað *there* nógv *many* [ sum *who* gera *do* <sup>1</sup>] (Fa.)

'It is also possible to undergo treatment together with your former spouse, and there are many people who do.' (*Dimmalætting*, 24 April 2015)

(34) *"Kjakokrati"*<sup>1</sup> *debate-ocracy* var *was* tað *there* onkur, *no one* [ sum *who* rópti *called* tað *it* <sup>1</sup> ], tá *when* fólk *people* á *on* ymsum *various* internetsíðum *web pages* viðmerkja *comment* evnir, *topics,* ella *or* geva *give* sína REFL meining *meaning* til *to* kennar. *known* (Fa.) 'No one called it "debateocracy" when people on various web pages commented on topics or let their options be known.' (*Dimmalætting*, 1 March 2019)

In order to investigate whether such constructions are used productively, Lindahl included extractions from relative clauses in her translation study. The 91 Faroese speakers were

<sup>(</sup>Platzack 2014, p. 10)

asked to translate five examples with relative clauses. Three of them were similar to (35) where the relative clause modifies the object of a lexical verb, here *ved* 'know'.

	- a. og *and tað*<sup>1</sup> *that* veit *know* eg *I* nógv *many* [ sum *that* er *are* einigur *in agreement* við *with* meg *me* um *about* <sup>1</sup> ] [1 inf.]
	- b. og *and tað*<sup>1</sup> *that* veit *know* eg, *I* at *that* tað *there* eru *are* nógv, *many* [ sum *that* eru *are* samd *same* við *with* mær *me* í *in* <sup>1</sup> ][1 inf.]
	- c. og *and tað*<sup>1</sup> *that* veit *know* eg *I* at *that* nógv *many* eru *are* samd *in agreement* um *about* 1
	- d. og *and* eg *I* veit *know* at *that* fleiri *many* eru *are* samd *in agreement* við *with* mær *me*
	- e. og *and* eg *I* veit *know* fleiri, *many* sum *who* er *are* samd *in agreement* við *with* mær *me*
	- f. og *and* eg *I* veit *know* nógv *many* ið *who* eru *are* einig *in agreement* við *with* mær *me*
	- g. og *and* eg *I* veit *know* nógv *many* ið *who* eru *are* einig *in agreement* við *with* mær *me* í *in tí that.*DAT

Only two of the Faroese participants (2%) replicated the preposing in the Danish original and produced the versions in (36a,b). The rest of them used a variety of strategies to convey the content of the Danish sentence.<sup>25</sup> In (36c), *tað* is fronted, but the sentence has been reformulated using an *at*-clause instead of a relative clause. (36d,e,f) use slight reformulations leaving out the pronoun, and (36g) keeps the relative clause, but leaves the pronoun *tí* (the dative form of *tað*) in situ.

For the two sentences where the Danish original was a presentational relative, as in (37), the Faroese speakers did produce some extractions from relative clauses in their translations, see (38).

(37) Ole *Ole* undrede *wondered* sig REFL over, *over* om *if* det *it* ville *would* regne *rain* i morgen, *tomorrow* men *but det*<sup>1</sup> *that* var *was* der *there* ingen, *no one* [der *who* troede *believed* 1]. (Da.)

'Ole wondered whether it would rain tomorrow, but no one thought so.'

	- a. men *but tí*1 *that.*DAT var *was* tað *there* eingin *no one* [ ið *who* trúði *believed* <sup>1</sup> ] [1 inf.]
	- b. men *but tað*<sup>1</sup> *that* var *was* tað *there* ongin *no one* [ sum *who* helt *thought* <sup>1</sup> ] [16 inf.]
	- c. men *but* tað *there* var *was* ongin *no one* [ sum *who* helt *though tað that* ]
	- d. men *but tað*<sup>1</sup> *that* helt *thought* ongin *no one* 1

A total of 17 participants (19% of the replies) retained the Danish structure, as shown in (38a,b). One participant used the relativizer *ið* as in (38a) and 16 participants used the relativizer *sum*. The other 74 informants reformulated the sentence either by not using a relative clause in the translation, by leaving the object in situ, as shown in (38c–g), or both, or using other reformulations, as in (38h). In the two examples where the matrix verb was *vera* 'be', 10–20% of the translations retained the Danish extraction structure, compared to 2–4% when the verb was *vita* 'know' or *kende* 'be acquainted with'.<sup>26</sup> This suggests that this particular type of extraction sentence is less degraded in Faroese, and may even be acceptable for some speakers, while extraction from other relative clauses is unacceptable. Faroese could thus potentially be a language that shows evidence for the "pseudo-relative" hypothesis put forth by McCawley (1981). He proposed that the relative clause in existential sentences in English is not a true relative clause; instead it has a somewhat reduced structure. This could explain why extraction in such an environment is sometimes marginally acceptable in English (see also Chung and McCloskey 1983; Kush et al. 2013).

#### *5.3. Summary*

There are clearly similarities between Faroese and Icelandic. In both languages the VP or propositional anaphor *það,tað* can be preposed locally and from *að/at*-clauses, as shown in the acceptability and translations studies summarized above. However, the impression is that this is more common in Faroese. Preposing of entity pronouns seems not to be a natural strategy given the alternative translations provided in (29) and (31). Given that preposing of *tað* is fairly common in Faroese, one might expect speakers to use preposing of *tað* from relative clauses as well. The translation study showed that this is not the case, except for preposing in presentational relative clauses, as in (38). This is also the type of preposing that Faroese speakers are most likely to hear and read since this is the most common type in Danish (Müller and Eggers 2022). In this respect, the Faroese speakers differ from Icelandic speakers who judge extraction from presentational clauses to be unnatural to the same extent as extractions from other types of relative clauses, as discussed in Section 4.2.

#### **6. Comparisons with Other Languages**

We have suggested that the frequent use of preposing of unstressed anaphoric pronouns in Swedish is a crucial factor for explaining the presence of spontaneous extractions from relative clauses in this language. Since extraction from relative clauses is not found in English and the continental Germanic languages German and Dutch, it becomes relevant to investigate whether local and long preposing is used in these languages.

#### *6.1. English*

In English, preposed (topicalized) phrases are normally stressed and are understood to imply contrast. Exceptions to this are the light adverbs *then* and *there* which do not require stress in initial position when they serve to connect the utterance to the preceding context. Attempts to prepose an unstressed personal pronoun sound very strange. Compare the options for answering the question in (7) in English.

	- a. \**It*<sup>1</sup> I bought <sup>1</sup> in 1980.

The preposed version in (39a) is clearly unacceptable whereas the version with the pronoun in situ in (39b) is fine. Preposing a stressed demonstrative is grammatical, (39c), but hardly appropriate in this context.27

When we look at the Swedish examples involving the VP anaphor *det*, we find that they are best rendered in English using VP ellipsis (Ø) (Bentzen et al. 2013; Hankamer and Sag 1976; Hardt 1999). Consider the question in (40).

	- a. Ja, *yes det*<sup>1</sup> *it* har *have* jag *I* 1.
	- b. Ja, *yes* jag *I* har *have det*. *it*
	- c. Yes, I have Ø.

In Swedish, this is a context where the VP anaphor *det* typically would be preposed. Leaving it in situ, (40b), is not ungrammatical but the preposed version is preferred (Lindahl and Engdahl Forthcoming).28 In English, repeating the finite verb and leaving out the rest of the VP is common and this is also what we have done in the English translations of the examples with VP anaphors, Swedish (5), Icelandic (17) and Faroese (21). Note that the VP ellipsis strategy can also be used in embedded clauses in English where Swedish uses preposing.

	- a. Ja, *yes det*<sup>1</sup> *it* tycker *think* jag *I* du *you* ska *shall* 1.
	- b. Yes, I think you should Ø.

There are clearly similarities between VP ellipsis in English and VP anaphor preposing in Swedish; in particular both require that the antecedent VP is available in the immediate context.

In contexts where a preposed *det* in Swedish refers back to a recently expressed proposition, the English version can sometimes have the anaphor *so*, as in (42) from the *NDC*.

(42) a. *int:* tycker *think* du *you* det är roligt med små \* barn? *it \* is fun \*\* with small children* int:'Do you think small children are fun?' b. *sp1:* ja *yes det*<sup>1</sup> *it* tycker *think* jag *I* faktiskt *actually* 1 sp1:'Yes, I actually think *so*.'

Given that VP ellipsis can also be used inside embedded clauses in English, as in (41b), one might ask whether this strategy can be used in English translations of extraction clauses. We have actually done so in (11) and repeat the translation here in (43).

(43) However, none of them are warm-blooded, there are no insects that are Ø.

This long distance VP ellipsis appears to be acceptable at least to some English speakers. However, the rest of the Swedish extraction examples, which involve preposed propositional or entity pronouns, are best translated into English with the pronoun in situ.29

#### *6.2. German and Dutch*

German and Dutch are both verb second languages and local preposing is quite common, but there are differences compared with Swedish. Consider the German version of the car dialogue.

	- a. *Das*<sup>1</sup> *that* habe *have* ich *I* <sup>1</sup> in *in* 1980 *1980* gekauft. *bought*
	- b. Ich *I* habe *have es it* in *in* 1980 *1980* gekauft. *bought*
	- c. \**Es*<sup>1</sup> *that* habe *have* ich *I* <sup>1</sup> in *in* 1980 *1980* gekauft. *bought*

The unmarked answer would be with a preposed unstressed demonstrative pronoun, a so called *d*-pronoun, as in (44a), or an unstressed personal pronoun in situ, (44b). Preposing of the neuter pronoun *es* is very restricted, see the discussions in Frey (2006); van Craenenbroeck and Haegeman (2007) and Theiler and Bouma (2012). Corpus studies reveal that preposing of personal pronouns is uncommon compared to preposing of *d*-pronouns. In a newspaper corpus, it was much more common for object *d*-pronouns to be preposed than to appear in situ whereas no personal object pronouns were preposed (Bosch et al. 2007).

In Dutch, preposing of personal pronouns is also uncommon compared to preposing of demonstratives (*d*-pronouns) (van Kampen 2007).

	- a. *Die*<sup>1</sup> *that* heb *have* ik *I* <sup>1</sup> in *in* 1980 *1980* gekocht. *bought*
	- b. Ik *I* heb *have hem it* in *in* 1980 *1980* gekocht. *bought*
	- c. #*Hem* heb ik <sup>1</sup> in 1980 gekocht.
		- *it have I in 1980 bought*

As in German, the unmarked answers have a preposed *d*-pronoun or a personal pronoun in situ. Preposing an unstressed personal pronoun is not ungrammatical but pragmatically odd.30 Bouma (2008, p. 112) found 4 preposed object personal pronouns in a 9 million words corpus of spoken Dutch (*Corpus Gesproken Nederlands*), compared to 2723 preposed *d*-pronouns.

When it comes to non-local preposing, both German and Dutch restrict this to contrastively stressed phrases. This has led some German linguists to propose that there are two types of preposing. Werner Frey distinguishes what he calls *formal movement* from *true A-bar movement* (Frey 2004, 2006, 2007). Formal movement involves local preposing to Spec,CP of the highest constituent in the middle field (IP). This accounts for preposing of subjects, both referential and expletive. Objects can also be preposed by formal movement when they are topics. On Frey's analysis this means that they have first moved to a topic position above the subject position in the middle field; this way they become the highest constituent in IP. True A-bar movement accounts for all other movement into Spec,CP and is linked to a marked interpretation, typically involving contrast. A similar proposal is made by Fanselow (2016) who distinguishes *unrestricted V2* where there are no pragmatic effects of the preposing and *restricted V2* which comes with pragmatic effects and induces contrast.

This distinction seems to capture the situation in German. All examples of spontaneously produced long preposings in German that we are aware of are contrastive, as predicted by Frey and Fanselow, see Andersson and Kvam (1984) and Lühr (1988).31 Two examples from Andersson and Kvam (1984) are shown here, involving preposing of contrastive adverbial phrases from a *daß* 'that' clause and an *ob* 'if' clause.


'Tuesday, I'm not sure if he will come, but Wednesday, he will certainly be there.'

To some extent, the distinction between formal movement and true A-bar movement is relevant for Swedish as well since expletive subjects can only be preposed in the local clause. However, we find no evidence for a topic position above the subject in the middle field in Swedish which means that preposing of unstressed object pronouns cannot be handled by formal movement (Lindahl and Engdahl Forthcoming). Instead, it seems that A-bar movement in Swedish is not correlated with contrast or a marked interpretation but can be used in order to connect utterances involving focus and topic chains.32 Highly proficient L2 speakers of German with Swedish L1 sometimes extend this type of preposing into spoken and written German with the result that "the preposed item is understood to be highlighted as very important even when it is not", as a native speaker of German recently commented.33

#### **7. Concluding Remarks**

anyone says that.'

In this article, we have explored the hypothesis that frequent use of local preposing of object pronouns increases the likelihood that speakers will also use long preposing from embedded clauses as well as from relative clauses. For Swedish, it seems clear that preposing of both subject and non-subjects pronouns is a common strategy when the pronoun refers to a recently mentioned event, property or entity, that is when they are part of a focus or topic chain. This preposing strategy can be extended to subordinate clauses and to relative clauses, provided that the rest of the utterance is a relevant comment on the preposed item in the context. Acceptable long preposings and extractions are thus doubly context dependent; first, the preposed item must be part of a focus or topic chain with respect to the previous utterance and second, it must be possible to interpret the preposed item as the aboutness topic of the utterance with the rest providing a comment that meets Grice's Maxim of Relevance. The second property presumably lies behind the fact that short presentational relative clauses are most common. When both these pragmatic conditions are met, long extractions can be used and do not cause problems for the listeners/readers.<sup>34</sup> This does not mean that there are no syntactic constraints on extractions in Swedish. For instance, the Coordinate Structure Constraint seems to apply, see, e.g., the discussion in Lindahl (2017b).

The situation in Icelandic is clearly different. Local preposing of the VP or propositional anaphor *það* occurs but is used much more seldom than in Swedish. Preposing of entity pronouns is unusual and seems to have a contrastive effect instead of being used for cohesion. Furthermore the pragmatic conditions that are important in Swedish do not seem to play any role when it comes to extraction from relative clauses. Not even when the sentences were pragmatically very plausible did the Icelandic participants in Lindahl's (2022) study judge them to be natural. We conclude that there must be a structural constraint operating in Icelandic which prevents such extractions and which is not affected by pragmatic conditions.

Faroese presents a more mixed picture. On the one hand, Faroese speakers often prepose the VP or sentential anaphor *tað*, similar to Danish. This suggests that preposing is employed as a cohesive device, but note that it does not seem to extend to entity pronouns. On the other hand, Faroese speakers react more similar to Icelanders when it comes to extractions from relative clauses; they try to avoid using them when they translate such sentences from Danish. This suggests that extractions from relative clauses are unacceptable in Faroese, similar to Icelandic, presumably due to a structural constraint. However, there is one interesting difference between the Faroese and Icelandic speakers present in our studies. The Faroese speakers seem to accept, and occasionally produce, extractions from presentational relatives, whereas the Icelanders find these unnatural. This may be due to influence from Danish where this kind is the most common type of relative clause extraction (Müller and Eggers 2022). It may also be that these relatives have a reduced structure in Faroese which makes extraction more acceptable. More research on Faroese is clearly called for.

One important aspect of pronoun preposing in the mainland Scandinavian languages is that it often involves unstressed pronouns. If the antecedent of the pronoun has just been introduced or already is a topic in the previous utterance, it is often natural to continue with an unstressed pronoun. (This holds for both subject and non-subject pronouns). In English, object preposing tends to induce a contrastive interpretation and consequently the preposed item must be stressed; this holds both for local and non-local preposing. In Dutch and German, unstressed demonstrative pronouns can be preposed from the same clause but only contrastively stressed items can be preposed from embedded clauses. In English, one way of connecting utterances without invoking contrast is to use VP ellipsis. This often turns out to be the best translation of Swedish utterances with preposed pronouns, but there are limitations, especially with regard to relative clauses.

Our comparative investigation has shown that preposing in some languages can be used to connect the utterance to the preceding context through anaphoric chains. This means that (long) preposing by itself is not necessarily associated with a contrastive interpretation. Whether a contrastive interpretation is plausible depends rather on the context of use and the type of preposed item. This should have consequences for psycholinguistic investigations of extractions in languages such as Swedish. If, as has been common so far, the experimenter uses materials with preposed lexical DPs, then very often a contrastive reading emerges. However, if the context calls for a cohesive continuation, a focus or topic chain, then a sentence with a preposed pronoun might be more natural.

**Author Contributions:** E.E. is mainly responsible for writing Sections 1, 2, 3.1, 6 and 7. The remaining Sections were written together. F.L. carried out the corpus studies reported in Sections 3–5 as well as the experimental studies in Sections 4–6. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.

**Funding:** Part of this research was supported by an International Postdoc grant (Dnr. 2017-06139) from the Swedish Research Council, awarded to F.L.

**Institutional Review Board Statement:** Not applicable.

**Informed Consent Statement:** Informed consent was obtained from all subjects involved in the study.

**Data Availability Statement:** Nordic Dialect Corpus http://www.tekstlab.uio.no/nota/scandiasyn/. The Swedish data concerning extraction from relative clauses are available at https://svn.spraakbanken. gu.se/sb-arkiv/pub/lindahl/2017/. The Icelandic and Faroese data presented in this study are available on request.

**Acknowledgments:** Earlier versions of parts of this paper have been presented at the workshop on Word Order in the Scandinavian languages, University of Konstanz, December 2018, the Linguistics Research Seminar at the University of Gothenburg, May 2021, and at the 12th International Conference of Nordic and General Linguistics, University of Oslo, June 2021. We would like to thank Maia Andréasson, Miriam Butt, Nomi Erteschik-Shir, Benjamin Lyngfelt, Peter Sells and Annie Zaenen for discussion and comments. We are grateful to Kristin Hagen and Anders Nøklestad from the Text laboratory at the University of Oslo for help with using the *Nordic Dialect Corpus*. We also thank Victoria Absalonsen, Gunnvør Hoydal Brimnes, Zakaris Svabo Hansen, Jógvan í Lón, Jóhannes Gísli Jónsson, Ida Larsson, Solveig Malmsten, Hjalmar Petersen, Sigríður Sigurjónsdóttir, and Annika Simonsen for help with the Danish, Faroese and Icelandic questionnaires and example sentences and for contacts with test participants. For the final version of the article, the comments from two anonymous reviewers were very helpful.

**Conflicts of Interest:** The authors declare no conflict of interest.

#### **Notes**


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