Scandinavian pancake sentences revisited

Abstract

This paper defends the analysis of Scandinavian ‘pancake sentences’ as semantic or referential agreement (Enger 2004). Alternative analyses assuming that pancake sentences are to be analysed as syntactic agreement (Josefsson 2009), have some drawbacks. Notably, the distinction between different kinds of gender is not well motivated; the connection between different uses of the neuter is lost, and the use of ‘light verbs’ and of invisible elements is problematic. The referential agreement analysis, in combination with the Agreement Hierarchy, yields diachronic predictions that turn out to be correct; the syntactic analysis does not yield anything equivalent. Furthermore, the agreement pattern for very ‘general’ nouns follows more naturally under the referential agreement analysis.