Object Shift

Abstract

This chapter outlines the variation in object shift found across the Scandinavian languages. It is shown that although object shift is subject to Holmberg’s generalisation in all Scandinavian languages (section 2.1), there is still a lot of variation: as to the syntactic complexity of the constituents that may undergo object shift (i.e. only weak pronouns or also full DPs; section 2.2); as to the obligatoriness of object shift (i.e. is object shift obligatory, optional or prohibited; section 2.3); and as to the grammatical function of the constituents that undergo object shift (i.e. argument or adverbial; section 2.5). Moreover, section 2.4 argues that morphological case cannot account for object shift.