Not All Objects Are Born Alike: Accessibility as a Key to Pronominal Object Shift in Swedish and Danish

This paper presents results from a corpus investigation of written Swedish and Danish. The results show that pronominal objects with clausal or VP antecedents appear relatively more seldom before sentence adverbials, i.e. are more seldom shifted, than referents with NP antecedents. I argue that this is due to a difference in cognitive status (cf. Gundel, Hedberg & Zacharski 1993), where pronouns with clausal or VP antecedents that appear in +FACTIVE environments and pronouns with NP antecedents are easier to process, which licenses object shift as well as an unstressed pronunciation. Pronominal objects with clausal or VP antecedents in -FACTIVE environments are harder to process and appear after sentence adverbials. For the LFG architecture the relation between cognitive status and information packaging gives rise to the need for a more Ūne grained value of the i-structure AC T VN feature introduced by O'Connor (2006). The paper also raises the question on whether research about the underlying mechanisms of object shift should be limited to two syntactic positions, i.e. object placement in relation to the sentence adverbial. Preliminary results show that the initial position in V2 clauses also need be investigated.