Workshop 5: Information Structure in Scandinavian Languages
Continuing and expanding topics
Filippa Lindahl & Elisabet Engdahl
University of Gothenburg
{filippa.lindahl/elisabet.engdahl}@svenska.gu.se
Preposing of pronouns is common in the mainland Scandinavian languages. An example in
Swedish from the Nordic Dialect Corpus is given in (1) (NDC, Johannesen et al. 2009).
(1) de ville ha reda på [när] man hade gjort sin första bilaffär
och den gjorde jag 1950 strax före
julen
and it made I 1950 soon before Christmas
‘They wanted to know when you made your first car deal, and I made mine in 1950 just before
Christmas’
We investigated a sample of 150 utterances with preposed pronouns in NDC, annotating the
pronouns and their antecedents for information structural function (cf. Erteschik-Shir 2007).
We found that 92 of the utterances involve rheme-topic chaining, where the antecedent of the
pronoun is introduced as (part of) a rheme (focus) in the preceding utterance. In 24 of the
utterances, the initial pronoun is part of a topic chain and in 20, the pronoun refers to an
immediately preceding left dislocated phrase which acts as an attention shift topic (Frascarelli
& Hinterhölzl 2007, Eide 2011). In all these cases, the preposed pronoun contributes to the
coherence of the dialogue and acts as a continuing topic.
It is also possible to prepose entire subordinate clauses as shown in (2) with an embedded
question, and in (3) with a that-clause.
(2) [Men varifrån
dessa strålar kommer]i är det
ingen
but
from where these rays come
is there no one
‘But no one knows where this radiation comes from.’
som
who
vet ei.
knows
(3) [Att den stämmer
med verkligheten]i är det väl heller ingen som
that it
corresponds with reality
is there PRT neither no one who
‘There is probably no one who really believes that it corresponds to reality.’
på allvar tror ei.
in earnest believes
Preposed clauses have received less attention than preposed noun phrases, and it might be
considered surprising to find such informationally heavy constituents in this position. As can
be seen in the examples in (2) and (3), subordinate clauses can even be fronted out of relative
clauses, resulting in a syntactically rather complex structure (Lindahl 2011). Preposed clauses
often contain a pronoun, a demonstrative or a definite description which refers back to an
antecedent in the preceding utterance. This way they maintain cohesion in the discourse at the
same time as they introduce new aspects of the question under discussion.
We analyze the data using Ginzburg’s (2012) Dialogue Gameboard. The DGB models the
discourse participants’ views of the common ground and provides a way to account for the
gradual changes in information states during a conversation. We propose that the pronouns
are preposed in order to provide cohesion and smooth transitions in the dialogue by referring
back to a referent that was recently introduced in the discourse. The fronted pronouns are
rarely contrastively accented, which makes the mainland Scandinavian languages’ use of
preposing different from the way it is used in languages like English and Catalan, where
topicalized phrases are almost exclusively interpreted as contrastive. The preposed clauses
typically both contain a backward looking anaphor and raise new issues related to the main
Workshop 5: Information Structure in Scandinavian Languages
topic of discussion which may lead to further contrastive comments. In this way, they behave
as expanding topics. The possibility to front constituents out of a relative clause suggests that
the tendency to front for discourse coherence is so strong that it can override the potential
processing disadvantage.
References
Eide, Kristin Melum (2011) Norwegian (non-V2) declaratives, resumptive elements, and the
Wackernagel position. Nordic Journal of Linguistics 34:179–213.
Erteschik-Shir, Nomi (2007). Information Structure: The Syntax-Discourse Interface. Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
Frascarelli, M. & Hinterhölzl, R. (2007). Types of topics in German and Italian. In Winkler,
S. & K. Schwabe (eds) Information Structure, Meaning and Form. p. 87–116.
Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Ginzburg, J. (2012). The interactive stance: Meaning for conversation. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Johannessen, Janne Bondi, Joel Priestley, Kristin Hagen, Tor Anders Åfarli & Øystein
Alexander Vangsnes (2009) The Nordic Dialect Corpus - an Advanced Research Tool. In
Jokinen, Kristiina & Eckhard Bick (eds) Proceedings of the 17th Nordic Conference of
Computational Linguistics NODALIDA 2009. NEALT Proceedings Series Volume 4.
Lindahl, F. (2011). Spetsställda bisatser i satsfläta med relativsats[Fronted subordinate clauses
and extractions from relative clauses]. Språk och Stil 21, 199–204.