Deconstructing Stylistic Fronting in Old Norwegian and Old Spanish

Abstract

Stylistic Fronting (SF) is usually defined as a special kind of fronting, where a constituent (or part of a constituent) which is not the subject is moved to a position that precedes the finite verb. SF is found in both Old Spanish and Old Norwegian. In this chapter we show that the two languages share several common properties regarding fronting patterns in embedded clauses, more specifically in restrictive relative clauses, and that in both languages, apparent heads and unambiguous phrases may be fronted. In both languages a fronted element may cooccur with an overt phrasal subject. These findings contribute to the ongoing debate on the phenomenon of Stylistic Fronting, suggesting that the original strong claims made regarding SF in Icelandic are idiosyncratic, and that the term Stylistic Fronting in fact subsumes several types of movement operations (Labelle & Hirschbühler 2017), some of which have none of the properties originally claimed for Stylistic Fronting in Icelandic. Furthermore, it appears as though the pragmatic effects of the fronting were similar in the two languages; fronting in restrictive relative clauses occurs to check an anaphoric feature (López 2009). The striking parallelisms between Old Spanish, a Romance language, and Old Norwegian, a Germanic one, invites further comparative research on similar syntactic phenomena in the languages.