Expletivt objekt på reträtt

This article presents a diachronic study of clause-anticipating object constructions in the history of Swedish. Corpus findings show that the object position is represented by an expletive in constructions with extraposed clausal arguments to a much higher degree in Old Swedish than in (Early) Modern Swedish. This change takes place simultaneously with another radical change in Swedish sentence structure, the loss of OV, and it is argued that the decrease in expletive objects in clause-anticipating constructions is due to the loss of a preverbal object position in the history of Swedish. The preverbal object position is traced back to an underspecified directionality of the head of the verb phrase, and hence the Old Swedish OV word order cannot be regarded simply as an effect of leftward movement. Besides the reduction in its frequency, the position of the expletive also becomes more restricted over time: in present-day Swedish, expletive objects in clause-anticipating constructions are mainly confined to the prefield, and it is argued that Modern Swedish expletives in clause-anticipating constructions are merged in the CP.