Object shift in Scandinavian languages: The impact of contrasted elements

Abstract

This paper argues for a unified analysis of mainland Scandinavian pronominal object shift and Icelandic full NP shift. Building on data showing the impact of accessibility on object placement in Swedish, Danish and Icelandic, I propose an Optimality Theoretic analysis where semantic/pragmatic constraints involving accessibility, information structure and contrast interact, but are ranked lower than syntactic constraints on, for example, verb placement. Finally, the impact of prosody on pronominal object shift is discussed.