Argument placement in Swedish

Abstract

This paper gives an overview of the Swedish data on argument placement in the Nordic Word Order Database (NWD; Lundquist et al. 2019). The data were collected from 54 native speakers in three different locations, and the experimental task elicited argument placement (subject shift, object shift, long object shift, particle shift). The results confirm that there is considerable inter- and intra-speaker variation in argument placement in Swedish, with the exception of the order between arguments and particles. Whereas subject shift appears to be obligatory with pronouns, there is variability in the placement of NP subjects, which cannot fully be explained with information structural factors. Long object shift is frequent with reflexives, whereas only a few speakers produce a small number of instances of long object shift with personal pronouns. Regular object shift is frequent, but not obligatory. We cannot observe any effects of dialect area or age in the dataset.