Scandinavian Stylistic Fronting: How Any Category Can Become an Expletive

The two central theses are (a) the category moved by stylistic fronting (SF) functions as a pure expletive in its derived position, which is [Spec, IP]; (b) what is moved under SF is only the phonological feature matrix of a category. The theory accounts for most of the properties of SF: why it appl...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Linguistic inquiry 2000-07, Vol.31 (3), p.445-483
Main Author: Holmberg, Anders
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Adverbs
Descriptive studies and applied theories
expletive
Expletives
Extended Projection Principle
Faroese
feature movement
Grammar
Grammatical clauses
Grammatical constructions
Icelandic
Icelandic language
Linguistic theory
Linguistics
Phonology
Pronoun
Pronouns
Scandinavian
Semantics
Sentences
Subject
Swedish language
Syntactics
Syntax
trace
Verbs
Word order
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Summary:The two central theses are (a) the category moved by stylistic fronting (SF) functions as a pure expletive in its derived position, which is [Spec, IP]; (b) what is moved under SF is only the phonological feature matrix of a category. The theory accounts for most of the properties of SF: why it applies only when there is a subject gap; why it affects almost any category, head or phrase; the locality conditions; and the crosslinguistic variation. SF belongs to Narrow Syntax, not the phonological component. Although the features moved by SF are invisible at LF, the specifier position created by SF is visible and is used by other categories that are visible at LF but invisible at PF.
ISSN:0024-3892
1530-9150
DOI:10.1162/002438900554406