Cover not available
Part of
The Perfect Volume: Papers on the perfect
Edited by Kristin Melum Eide and Marc Fryd
[Studies in Language Companion Series 217] 2021
► pp. 343–364

Chapter 14
The Swedish perfect and periphrasis

| Linnaeus University , Sweden

This paper investigates the apparent near-optionality of the perfect auxiliary ha (‘have’) in Swedish. Restrictions on the near-optionality of ha-omission are typically recognized in the previous literature as lexical or structural. The paper scrutinizes the viability of these restrictions by means of corpus data. Most of these restrictions are shown not to hold. Instead, the paper defends the view that the optionality of the perfect auxiliary ha in Swedish is linked to whether the clause it occurs in requires a finite feature or not, and whether ha is the only element that can supply a value for this feature. The phenomenon of ha-omission is accounted for in the syntactic frame work LFG. It is shown that ha can only be omitted if another element in the clause can provide a value for the finite feature.

Keywords: finiteness, LFG, morphology, paradigm, lexical features
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Lexical restrictions
  • 3.Structural restrictions
    • 3.1Raising constructions
    • 3.2ECM
  • 4.The corpus study
    • 4.1Material
    • 4.2Method
    • 4.3Results and discussion
      • 4.3.1Lexical restrictions
      • 4.3.2Structural restrictions
  • 5.A lexical approach to ha-omission
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Abbreviations
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 9 July 2021
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.217.14hei
References
Ackerman, Farrell, & Webelhuth, Gert
1998 A theory of predicates. Stanford, CA.: CSLI Publications.Google Scholar
Andersson, Anders-Börje, & Dahl, Östen
1974 Against the penthouse principle. Linguistic Inquiry 5:451–453.Google Scholar
Andréasson, Maia, Karlsson, Susanna, Magnusson, Erik, & Tingsell, Sofia
2004  Har/hade- bortfall. Hur finit är ett naket supinum? In Svenskans beskrivning 26, ed. Björn Melander. Hallgren & Fallgren.Google Scholar
Binnick, Robert I.
1991 Time and the verb: A guide to tense and aspect. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Bonami, Olivier, & Samvelian, Pollet
2015 The diversity of inflectional periphrasis in Persian. Journal of Linguistics 51:327–382. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Börjars, Kersti, Engdahl, Elisabet, & Andréasson, Maia
2003 Subject and object positions in Swedish. In Proceedings of the LFG03, ed. Miriam Butt and Tracy Holloway King, 43–58. Stanford, Ca: CSLI Publications.Google Scholar
Bresnan, Joan
1982 The passive in lexical theory. In The mental representation of grammatical relations, ed. Joan Bresnan, 3–86. Cambridge, MA.: MIT Press.Google Scholar
2001 Lexical-functional syntax. Blackwell Textbooks in Linguistics 16. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Bresnan, Joan, Asudeh, Ash, Toivonen, Ida, & Wechsler, Stephen
2015 Lexical-functional syntax, 2nd edition. Chichester, West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Chumakina, Marina, & Corbett, Greville G.
2013 Periphrasis: the role of syntax and morphology in paradigms. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Comrie, Bernard
1976 Aspect: An introduction to the study of verbal aspect and related problems. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Dahl, Östen
1985 Tense and aspect systems. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Dalrymple, Mary
2001 Lexical Functional Grammar. San Diego, CA.: Academic Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2015a Morphology in the LFG architecture. In Proceedings of lfg15, ed. Miriam Butt and Tracy Holloway King, 64–83. Stanford: CSLI.Google Scholar
2015b Periphrasis and morphology in LFG. Handout, Workshop on Morphology, Tokyo, Japan.Google Scholar
Falk, Yehuda
2003 The English auxiliary system revisited. In Proceedings of LFG03, ed. Miriam Butt and Tracy Holloway King, 184–204. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications.Google Scholar
Falk, Yehuda N.
2001 Lexical-functional grammar: An introduction to parallel constraint-based syntax. Stanford, CA.: CSLI Publications.Google Scholar
Gibson, Edward, & Fedorenko, Evelina
2013 The need for quantitative methods in syntax and semantics research. Language and Cognitive Processes 28:88–124. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Häussler, Jana, & Juzek, Tom
2017 Hot topics surrounding acceptability judgement tasks. In Proceedings of linguistic evidence 2016 – empirical, theoretical, and computational perspectives, ed. Sam Featherston, Robin Hörnig, Reinhild Steinberg, Birgit Umbreit, and Jennifer Wallis, 1–21. [URL].: University of Tübingen, online publication system.
Hedlund, Cecilia
1992 On Participles. Doctoral Dissertation, Stockholm University, Stockholm.
Heinat, Fredrik
2017 The syntax and morphology of the periphrastic perfect in Swedish. ms.Google Scholar
Holm, Gösta
1951 Om utelämnandet av hjälpverbet hava i bisats [on the omission of the auxiliary verb hava in subordinate clauses]. Nysvenska studier 30:87–93.Google Scholar
Holmberg, Anders
1986 Word order and syntactic features in the Scandinavian languages and English. Doctoral Dissertation, University of Stockholm.
Holmberg, Anders, & Platzack, Christer
1995 The role of inflection in Scandinavian syntax. Oxford studies in comparative syntax. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Iatridou, Sabine, Anagnostopoulou, Elena, & Izvorski, Roumyana
2001 Observations about the form and meaning of the perfect. In Ken Hale: A life in language, ed. Michael Kenstowicz and Ken Hale, 189–238. MIT Press.Google Scholar
Julien, Marit
2002 Optional ha in Swedish and Norwegian. The Journal of Comparative Germanic Linguistics 5:67–95. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Klingvall, Eva
2013  Få and its passive complement. In Non-canonical passives, 297–314. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Larsson, Ida
2009 Participles in time. The development of the perfect tense in Swedish. Doctoral dissertation, Göteborgs Universitet, Göteborg.
McCawley, James D.
1971 Tense and time reference in English. In Studies in linguistic semantics, ed. Charles Fillmore and D. T. Langendoen, 96–113. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.Google Scholar
Nikolaeva, Irina
2013 Unpacking finiteness. In Canonical morphology and syntax, ed. Dunstan Brown, Marina Chumakina, and Greville G. Corbett, 99–122. Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Platzack, Christer
1986 COMP, INFL and Germanic word order. In Topics in Scandinavian syntax, ed. L. Hellan and K. K. Christensen, 185–234. Dordrecht: Reidel. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Sadler, Louisa, & Spencer, Andrew
2001 Syntax as an exponent of morphological features. In Yearbook of morphology 2000, ed. Geert Booij and Jaap van Marle, 71–96. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Sells, Peter
2005 Morphological and constructional expression and recoverability of verbal features. In Morphology and the web of grammar, ed. C. Orhan Orgun and Peter Sells, 197–224. Stanford, CA.: CSLI Publications.Google Scholar
2007 Finiteness in non-transformational syntactic frameworks. In Finiteness: Theoretical and empirical foundations, ed. Irina Nikolaeva, 59–88. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Spencer, Andrew
2001 The paradigm-based model of morphosyntax. Transactions of the Philological Society 99:279–313. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2013 Lexical relatedness. Oxford: Oxford University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Stump, Gregory
2001 Inflectional morphology: A theory of paradigm structure. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Taraldsen, Knut Tarald
1984 Some phrase strucure dependent differences between Swedish and Norwegian. Working Papers in Scandinavian Syntax 9.Google Scholar
Teleman, Ulf, Hellberg, Staffan, & Andersson, Erik
1999 Svenska akademiens grammatik. Stockholm: Norstedts Ordbok.Google Scholar
Cited by

Cited by 1 other publications

Larsson, Ida
2021. Chapter 12. On the emergence of auxiliary selection in Germanic. In The Perfect Volume [Studies in Language Companion Series, 217], ► pp. 292 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 29 may 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.