The pragmatics and syntax of pronoun preposing

Abstract

Preposed pronouns have a dual role of both connecting the utterance to the context and serving as its starting point. While central to understanding restrictions on syntactic movement to the left periphery, this type of fronting has often been overlooked. We provide an analysis of the pragmatics and syntax of Swedish pronoun preposing based on a study of spontaneously produced spoken language from the Nordic Dialect Corpus. We find that there is a strong preference for preposing pronouns that function as switch topics and that it is also possible to prepose continued topics, but in neither case is the preposing obligatory. We argue that these sentence-external relations of the topic are not encoded in the syntax of the left periphery in Swedish, but reflect pragmatic strategies for discourse progression. The types of topic (switch or continued) are furthermore shown not to correlate with the prosodic realization of the pronoun. A key feature of our analysis is that we distinguish the sentence-external function of the preposed phrase from the sentence-internal function of providing the aboutness topic for the utterance. We adopt an analysis of the left periphery proposed by Holmberg, where FinP acts as a bottleneck, and there is only one, syncretic, Force-Topic head above Fin. The fact that we only see evidence for one topic position to the left of the subject in Swedish sets this language apart from German and Italian as they are analyzed by e.g. Frey and Frascarelli and Hinterhölzl, as does the fact that A'-movement of pronouns in Swedish does not imply any particular prosodic marking.