Object Shift Research Articles

Successes and shortcomings of phonological accounts of Scandinavian object shift

Object shift (OS) is a word order phenomenon in Scandinavian languages where under some circumstances the object appears before a sentential adverb. Despite the frequent assumptions that word order is determined in syntax, and despite the link of OS and syntactic phenomena like V2, there is no consensus that OS is a syntactic phenomenon. Particularly, it has been observed that OS targets specifically prosodically weak elements. This motivated recent analyses of OS as a prosodic phenomenon. We focus on two proposals that look for a synchronic motivation for OS in a correlation between its distribution and some prosodic property: (i) Erteschik-Shir et al. (2020) posit that OS is motivated and modulated by prosodic incorporation, and (ii) Hosono (2013) hypothesizes that shifted pronominal objects help facilitate downstep. We identify concrete predictions from both proposals (default prosodic incorporation, and no downstep in unshifted OS-context sentences, respectively) and test them using novel data. The results show that neither of the proposals can be maintained in its original form. In addition to the empirical shortcomings of the prosodic proposals, we explore a missed syntactic generalization regarding the role objecthood plays in OS.

MATCHING Phrases in Norwegian Object Shift

One significant contribution of generative linguistics has been to our understanding of 'movement,' which occurs when a word is linearized in a position different from where it is interpreted. Even though movement often is considered a syntactic phenomenon, some cases seem best analyzed prosodically, such as pronoun post-posing in Irish (Bennett, Elfner, & McClosky 2016). We explore prosodically driven movement in Norwegian, which is known for having pronominal object shift (OS). We show that OS can be explained by Match Theory (Selkirk 2009, 2011), but only if the MATCH constraints are sensitive to lexical items and their projects instead of Elfner's (2012) definition where Match is sensitive to lexical and functional elements and their projections (see also Ito & Mester 2019).

Sound Patterns of Syntax: Object Shift

In this paper, I explore what a purely phonological account of object shift (OS) involves and what research questions it leads to, in particular what it means for word order to be phonologically motivated and what morpho-phonological primitives are involved. I pursue the possibility that what licenses OS of full DPs in Icelandic is phonological properties, not found in other Scandinavian languages, together with overt case marking. Although the position of the object is determined phonologically, the architecture I propose, in which topic and focus play a central role, allows for an account of the semantic effect associated with OS in Icelandic.

How Phonological is Object Shift?

The papers here represent very different analyses of Object Shift (OS), and take very different positions on the interaction of phonology and syntax, an area in which there are many unsettled questions.

Focus structure architecture and P-syntax

In this paper we discuss scrambling type phenomena in Danish [object shift (OS)], and Russian and argue that scrambling is a P(honological)-syntactic rule in the phonology. Our proposal is that Scrambling languages such as Russian employ P-syntactic scrambling to position foci VP-finally. Nonscrambling languages, or Topic-in-situ languages such as Scandinavian, may employ a different strategy: they prosodically incorporate destressed elements. The scrambling effect in Scandinavian is due to the fact that the incorporated constituent moves along with its host. We propose the “I” model architecture to allow for interpretive effects of scrambling.