16 April 1999

Stylistic Fronting: how any category can become an expletive

Anders Holmberg

University of Tromsö and MIT

Scandinavian Stylistic Fronting (SF) is an operation, productive in Icelandic and Faroese, which moves a category, a head or a phrase, to what looks like the subject position in clauses where there is a subject gap: subject relatives, subject extractions, and impersonal constructions.

	[Sá sem fyrstur er _ a> skora mark]  faer sérstök ver>laun. (Icelandic)    
	he that first  is  to  score goal  gets special price 
Ef gengi> er _ eftir Laugaveginum... if gone is along Laugavegur 'If one walks along Laugavegur...'

I will argue that (a) SF is, indeed, movement to specIP, (b) the category moved by SF functions as an expletive in its derived position, (c) what is moved under SF is only the phonological feature matrix of a category. The theory accounts for most of the properties of SF: Why it applies only when there is a subject gap, why it affects almost any category, head or phrase, the locality conditions, and the cross-linguistic variation. In fact Mainland Scandinavian and even English have a form of SF, but restricted to adjuncts. SF belongs to Narrow Syntax, not the phonological component. Although the features moved by SF are invisible at LF, the spec-position created by SF is visible, and used by other categories which are visible at LF but invisible at PF.