The pragmatics and syntax of pronoun preposing

Abstract Preposed pronouns have a dual role of both connecting the utterance to the context and serving as its starting point. While central to understanding restrictions on syntactic movement to the left periphery, this type of fronting has often been overlooked. We provide an analysis of the pragmatics and syntax of Swedish pronoun preposing based on a study of spontaneously produced spoken language from the Nordic Dialect Corpus. We find that there is a strong preference for preposing pronouns that function as switch topics and that it is also possible to prepose continued topics, but in ne... Mehr ...