Talspråk, skriftspråk och grammatik: Om placeringen av adverbial i svenska

Abstract

There is a well-known tendency among the world’s languages for adverbials to be placed on the same side of a verb as complements. Some linguists have even claimed that complex, head-initial adverbials (e.g. PPs) cannot immediately precede V in a strict VO language – most notably Haider (in press), who proposes the Left-Left Constraint to exclude structures where a head-initial adjunct immediately precedes a VP-internal main verb in VO languages. In this paper, however, it is argued that the positional possibilities of adverbials in Swedish, a strict VO language, provide counter evidence to the Left-Left Constraint and similar restrictions on phrase structure. An empirical investigation, containing data from both spoken and written language of present-day Swedish, clearly shows that head-initial adverbials such as PPs can indeed immediately precede a VP-internal verb. The word order PP-V is certainly more frequent in a written, formal register than in spontaneous speech, and it is possible that comparable AdvPs are somewhat more frequent in a position preceding the main verb than PPs. All indications are, however, that these differences belong to the domain of usage rather than grammar.