On Prosody and Focus in Object Shift

Abstract

Abstract. Recent work on object shift in the Scandinavian languages has rejected earlier syntactic analyses in favor of prosodic or information‐structural accounts. In this paper I present new evidence from Danish copular clauses that argues against a prosodic analysis of the phenomenon. In particular, I show that specificational copular clauses do not allow object shift and that this fact cannot be accounted for in prosodic terms. I propose that the observed lack of object shift is due to the fixed information structure of specificational clauses: the object is invariably focused and that is what prevents it from shifting. This account dovetails with the focus‐based analysis of object shift proposed by Holmberg (1999), and is also compatible with the syntactic analysis developed by Sells (2001).