Enclitic Subjects and Agreement Inflection in Viskadalian Swedish
Nordic Atlas of Language Structures (NALS) Journal, Vol. 2, 1-39 Copyright © E. M. Petzell 2017 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License Enclitic subjects and agreement inflection in Viskadalian Swedish Erik M. Petzell Institute for Language and Folklore, Gothenburg Abstract: In this article, I describe the subject clitics of the traditional Swedish dialect in Viskadalen; I refer to this variety as “Viskadalian”. The Viskadalian subject clitcs are prosodically dependent on a verbal host to their left; thus, they occur only with VS word order. In most cases, it is the clitic that conveys the reference of the subject (kan=ik, ‘can.PRS.SG=I’, kan=et, ‘can.PRS.SG=it’). However, when the verb is inflected for both number and person, Viskadalian uses the seemingly meaningless clitic ä: fing-em=ä, ‘get.PST.PL-1PL=ä’, så-st=ä, ‘see.PST-2SG=ä’. I argue that the clitic ä is not a pure expletive but in fact represents a partially reduced phi-feature bundle: it is a pronominal version, as it were, of such partially reduced verbal agreement endings in VS contexts that have been attested in many Germanic varieties. Petzell Enclitic subjects and agreement NALS Journal Key words: Enclitic subject pronouns, Swedish dialects, Viskadalian, Verbal agreement, VS word order, Phi-feature reduction 1. Introduction This article deals with finite verbs and their pronominal subjects in the Swedish dialect of Viskadalen, ‘the valley of the river Viskan’. The river Viskan, which is the northernmost of the rivers of Halland (the others are Ätran, Nissan and Lagan), actually starts in the province of Westrogothia (Sw.
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