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Syntactic Variation in Insular Scandinavian
Edited by Höskuldur Thráinsson, Caroline Heycock, Hjalmar P. Petersen and Zakaris Svabo Hansen
[Studies in Germanic Linguistics 1] 2017
► pp. 277–306

Stylistic fronting and related constructions in the Insular Scandinavian Languages

| University of Iceland

This chapter reports on the similarities and differences between Stylistic Fronting (SF) and related constructions in Icelandic and Faroese. Contrary to the claim that “any category can become an expletive” (Holmberg 2000), it is argued that stylistically fronted elements and overt expletives are not equivalent. In both languages, expletive insertion is preferred over SF in complement clauses, but in Faroese, unlike in Icelandic, expletive insertion is preferred over SF in adverbial clauses and relative clauses as well. The overall data presented and discussed here suggest that the possibility of SF is partly conditioned by the clause type and the nature of the element fronted by SF and partly by lexical/idiomatic factors.

Keywords: embedded clauses, expletive insertion, Faroese, Icelandic, left edge phenomena, stylistic fronting, subject gap
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Background
    • 2.1Introduction
    • 2.2Overview
    • 2.3Locality issues
    • 2.4Stylistic Fronting as head movement
  • 3.Judgment data
    • 3.1Introduction
    • 3.2Icelandic
    • 3.3Faroese
    • 3.4Summary
  • 4.Discussion
    • 4.1Previous accounts
    • 4.2The structural environment of Stylistic Fronting and related constructions
  • 5.Final remarks
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 18 July 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/sigl.1.10ang
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