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Given that the settings of the agreement and pro-drop parameters of Older Swedish (pre- 1500, in Table 12. above) are almost identical to those of Old Italian, as shown by the highlights in Table 12., the investigation of SF in Old Swedish has to face the same ambiguities that were encountered in the previous section with regard to Old Italian. Namely, the possibility to have null subjects in main clauses makes it difficult to distinguish whether a preverbal item has moved by SF in presence of a subject gap, or rather is fronted by topicalization in a canonical V2 structure, with a postverbal null subject. Given this ambiguity, Delsing (2001) chooses to explore the distribution of SF

124 _{As broadly discussed in Falk (1993) the loss of expletive pro-drop is not sudden in Swedish. This is an}

indication that the system is changing in 1500-1600 Swedish, and that pro-drop does depend on V-to-Fin in this language (thanks to Cecilia Poletto for bringing this fact to my attention).

in Old Swedish relative clauses only, where no V2 topicalization is expected (and the subject is extracted, in subject relatives).

Delsing (2001) investigates the occurrence of SF in relative clauses in Old Swedish from 1200 up to 1700. Early Old Swedish presents different possibilities for relative marking: som; ær; less frequently ther, or a null relative marker. Around 1350, ær is lost and replaced by a more consistent use of ther, literally “there”, and by hvilkin, translated as “which”, occurring both by itself or as a noun determiner. Delsing (2001) shows these mutations in a table, reported below as Table 16.

Table 16. Relative markers in Swedish (Delsing 2001, 159, fig. 1)

1200 1300 1400 1500 1600 1700 word order OV---OV/VO---VO--- Ø --- som --- ær --- - - - ther - - - - - - - - - - - --- - - - - - - - hvilkin ---

Delsing observes that hvilkin can also cooccur with som and ther as illustrated in (302). Notice that around the same time as hvilkin appears in the grammar (1350), the word order pattern changes from consistently OV to into one in which OV and VO orders are in competition. This factor, together with the loss of the relative marker ær, indicates that a new system is being enforced as of 1375-1400.

(302) a. brudhgöma. [Hulkin som är äronna konungir] (Old Swedish, 1375-1400) Groom which SOM is honour king.GEN

“The groom who is the king’s honour” b. thu min dottir [hulka ther iak vtwalde mik] you my daughter which there I chose to.me

“You, my daughter, who I chose for myself” [Delsing 2001, 159, 48, BU] According to Delsing’s (2001) data, SF is obligatory in relative clauses both with sum and with ær, before 1350, with a few exceptions due to the fact that either there are no potential candidates to SF or they are “heavy” constituents which remain in a low position (recall that Old Swedish SF targets a wider range of items, in comparison to Modern Icelandic). Given the basic OV order of the language, SF can easily move (light) objects from their base position125_{, which explains the productivity of SF in this}

period. Recall from the previous analyses (cf. chapter 2) that Old Italian exhibits

125_{Of course SF of objects in non-periphrastic constructions is ambiguous with the base OV order.}

Nonetheless, Delsing (2001) provides many examples of object SF to a pre-modal or pre-auxiliary positions which unambiguously speaks in favor of object SF.

frequent OV order, derived by movement of objects to an agreement projection (Egerland 1996); to some focus/topic-marked position in the vP-left periphery or by quantifier movement (cf. Poletto 2005). The fact that Old Swedish and its contemporary Old Italian counterpart both exhibit OV order and SF supports Delsing’s (2001) idea that preverbal objects are more local to the SF probe.

Delsing (2001) considers whether any differences in the distribution of SF occur as the Old Swedish system changes in 1375-1400. Even though all the relative markers available at that time may be found interchangeably in subject and in object relatives, there seems to be a preference for using hvilkin som in subject relatives, whereas hvilkin alone is most used in non subject relatives. This difference is illustrated in Table 17., referring to the data provided in Delsing (2001):

Table 17. Relative markers in subject and object relatives in Old Swedish (1375-1400) Relative

markers

Total Relativized element

subject non-subject and % on total

hvilkin 1397 399 998 71%

hvilkin som 872 767 105 14%

On the one hand, Delsing observes that:

“SF seems almost obligatory with the single hvilkin (which), i.e. hvilkin without a noun” (p. 163).

The only exceptions consist of cases where a verbal particle is preposed to the inflected verb, to which they are prefixed in Delsing’s analysis126_{. Compare the case of adverbs}

fronting in (303)a. to the underlined particle fronting in (303)b.:

(303)a. som grymasto diwr hulke adrigh kunna ___ mättas (Old Swedish, 1375-1400) like most.cruel anymals which never can be.satisfied

“Like the most cruel animals which can never be satisfied” b. Hulkin framgik til sanctum gregorium

which forth.went to saint Gregory

“Which went forth to saint Gregory” [Delsing 2001, 163, 54, Greg] On the other hand, Delsing notices that SF is not obligatory with hvilkin som: his data show that SF occurs in the 91% of the relative clauses introduced by single hvilkin, for a total of 363 clauses on 399. By contrast, SF is present only in the 36% of the relative clauses introduced by hvilkin som, for a total of 276 clauses on 767. Given that the function of hvilkin and hvilkin som are to a small extent interchangeable, a total absence of SF in hvilkin som-relatives is not expected, inasmuch as hvilkin som can marginally be used to introduce non-subject relatives. Following Delsing’s (2001) results and analysis, the hypothesis is that som licenses subject gaps. As proposed above, this

126 _{This is not a problem for the derivation of particle SF proposed in chapter 3. All of Delsing’s (2001)}

cases of prefixed particles concern inflected lexical verbs, but no constructions with modal or auxiliaries. It is possible that the particle be prefixed to the verbal head in a position below AgrOP to which the potential object has been previously extracted (cf. Figure 7., p. 169). In the following step, the remnant VP consisting of the complex particle+verb moves to inflection and to FinP.

function is optionally covered by SF, which explains the complementary distribution between som and SF.127

To summarize and discuss the facts illustrated above, Old Swedish has been compared to Old Italian, following Delsing (2001). Around 1250-1300 (the period covered by the excerpted Old Italian corpora discussed in the previous chapters), both languages are OV, have pro-drop in main clauses and exhibit SF in subject relative clauses, which is optional, although very common, in Old Italian, and obligatory in Old Swedish (unless the potential candidate is a “heavy” constituent which is then left in situ). In this period, Old Swedish relative markers are ær, som, (less frequently) ther or a null head.

As from 1350, the Old Swedish system starts changing: the OV competes with a VO order and, around the same period the relative marker ær disappears, whereas hvilkin is adopted. Differently from the former generic relative markers, hvilkin requires that a distinction between subject and non-subject extractions is operated, perhaps in relation to its intrinsic features. As a consequence, when hvilkin introduces a subject relative, the head where the subject features are interpreted must be lexicalized. In the previous system, this operation was done by SF as proposed for Old Italian. Once the relative marker hvilkin is introduced, subject extractions are made possible by merger of the head som, as a syntactic realization of the head of FinP. Thus the hvilkin som construction becomes an alternative strategy of subject extraction in competition with SF. Basically, the SF strategy satisfy the feature checking requirement of FinP by (remnant) movement of an XP to/through Spec,FinP. Instead, the hvilkin som strategy carries out the same function by hvilkin-through-Spec, FinP and merger of som in Fin, which is specific for subject extractions. At this point, some remarks on the proposed analysis are in order.

The mechanism licensing subject drop/extraction by movement of rather unspecialized syntactic material, as is the case for SF, is accounted by a (tentative) analysis that can be summed up as follows:

(a) The phi-features of Fin are default and/or can be valued by means of OP- movement through Spec,FinP in extractions.

(b) When the “Subject of Predication” is not lexically realized in the IP- periphery, FinP encodes other features than the subject ones. Such features express what needs to be made discourse prominent, in line with Sigurðsson's (2008) proposal on the generic character of EPP. In presentational constructions (e.g. expletive-associate chains), the expletive introduces the real subject located in a lower position, but it is not itself the real “Subject of Predication”. Similarly, the phrase undergoing SF is not the “Subject of Predication”, but enables the interpretation of some syntactic material merged into a lower structural position. Such syntactic material provides information either on the event or on the event modal/temporal location, depending on whether is it part of the argument structure, or rather a phrasal (IP) adverb, respectively.

127 _{The cases where SF cooccurs with som are all non-subject relatives. The occurrence of som in non-}

subject relatives are significantly less than those in subject relatives. Nonetheless the presence of som in non-subject relatives, albeit limited, seems in contrast with Delsing’s idea that it licenses a subject gap. This issue is solved if we assume that the lack of specialization of som is attested at an earlier stage of the language, given that som is already an unspecialized entry. Later som undergoes a reanalysis: it becomes specific for subject extractions, whereas the unspecialized entry is not excluded from the grammar. Since the reanalysis process is gradual, an overlap between specialized and unspecialized use of som is visible in the hvilkin som data.

(c)The explanation provided in (b) above is motivated as follows. A non-full-pro- drop language may require that some syntactic material related to the eventive content of the clause (or to its temporal/modal coordinates) be visible in the information structure and functionally realize the clausal theme, in absence of an overt Subject-of- Predication. This strategy, however, is licensed only in languages where (at least default) phi-features can be identified without merger of an overt pronoun (i.e. partial pro-drop languages).

It is worth remarking that SF was generalized to all relative clauses (and possibly had some pragmatic import) in the early Old Swedish period, since relative markers did not distinguish between subject and non-subject extractions. At a later stage, when the hvilkin som strategy becomes available, SF in subject relatives is no longer required, becoming more and more a residual phenomenon, limited to non-subject relatives. The disappearance of SF from Modern Swedish can thus be attributed to its loss of the competition against the hvilkin som construction as a strategy to extract the subject. At this point the question is: why is SF in complementary distribution with som when the latter is selected by hvilkin in subject relative clauses, but not with the unspecific som which is found in Swedish throughout the analyzed period (cf. Table 16)? As mentioned above, a possibility is that the som required by hvilkin to specify subject relativizations occurs in a different, lower position than the generic som, i.e. Fin. Evidence in support of this hypothesis is provided by comparing Old Swedish to Modern Scandinavian languages, as is presented in section 4.9.