OV-ordföljd i svenskans historia

Abstract

The development of OV in Swedish has been investigated only in part before. The lack of full coverage can be – at least to some extent – explained by the long-lasting view in the literature that some instantiations of OV (especially finite-verb final) constitute a mere style of writing, an artificial trait adopted from German. In this paper, the traditional view is challenged. It is shown that the usage of different OV-patterns certainly varies with level of formality – ArgViVf is high style, whereas ArgVfVi is colloquial – but to go from there to claiming that a pattern is completely superficial is hardly motivated. Moreover, shifts in the relative distribution of OV-patterns that are observable in texts after ca. 1500 (whereby ArgVf replaces VfArgVi as the dominant pattern) seem to be due to German-Swedish language contact. Nothing suggests, however, that any form of OV was ever “imported” from German. These contact-induced shifts in the usage of OV not only affect the OV system. Indirectly, they also provide new acquirers of the language with more unambiguous cues that Vf does not move out of VP. Consequently, the possibility to move Vf to Io (i.e. V-to-I-movement) is lost in the beginning of the 1600s.