Verb-particles: particle placement in passives

Abstract

As discussed in the chapter on particle placement in active clauses (Lundquist 2014a), there is some interesting variation within Scandinavia with respect to particle placement in active clauses. In participial passive clauses, the verb particle always prefixes to the participle in Swedish, while it follows the participle in Danish and Icelandic, see e.g. Johannisson (1939) and Svenonuis (2005) for details. In Standard Norwegian and Faroese, the particle most often follows the participle, but in certain contexts, the particle can also prefix to the participle, just like in Swedish. There are also dialects of Norwegian where particles more freely prefix to participles, most notably the dialect spoken in Romsdal, as discussed in detail in Sandøy (1979). The following examples show the two possible particle placements in Scandinavian: (1) from Danish has the post­participial particle, and (2) from the Romsdal dialect has an incorporated particle (from Sandøy 1979):