Extraposition in English and Swedish 235
Although Swedish and English follow similar principles for ordering informa-
tion, there is a crucial difference in the syntactic word order on to which informa-
tion is mapped in the two languages. In English there is an SV constraint which
requires the subject to precede the verb in declarative clauses. English also allows
the subject to be preceded by a clustering of several clause elements in sentence-
initial position (Smits 2002: 16), as in (5) where there are two adverbials, today and
in Belize before the formal subject, there.
(5) Today in Belize there are some 230 primary schools employing about 1,950
teachers and enrolling 45,200 children. (Smits 2002: 50)
As Altenberg (1998: 118) points out, preverbal position in English may therefore
“not only be of great potential complexity but may in fact cover an extensive part
of an English text.” In Swedish, in contrast, there is a V2 constraint, which nor-
mally allows only one clause element to be placed before the verb in declarative
main clauses, as in (6), where the initial adverb imorgon ‘tomorrow’ is followed by
inversion of the subject jag ‘I’ and the verb måste ‘must’.
(6) Imorgon måste jag arbeta (Holmes & Hinchcliffe 2003: 459)
‘Tomorrow must I work’
In Swedish declaratives, then, there may be only one single clause element in pre-
verbal position. There are, on the other hand, fewer restrictions as to what type of
clause element this may be (Erman 1998: 130). It has, for instance, been found in
corpus comparisons of English and Swedish translations that adverbials, objects
and complements are placed before the verb more frequently in Swedish than in
English (M. Johansson 1996; Erman 1998; Svensson 2000). According to Erman
(1998: 118), this is because in Swedish “the overriding principle seems to be that
the initial element should connect backwards to the previous discourse.”
Comparisions of English and Swedish source texts and their translations have
shown that clefts are used more frequently in Swedish (M. Johansson 2002: 111),
as are existential constructions (Herriman 2012).^4 Furthermore, Swedish often
has light, ‘empty’ subjects, such as det ‘it’ in the Theme, as well as other short
semantically general pronouns, e.g. the generic pronoun man (Koskela 1996:
211; Bäckström 2004: 91). Bäckström, in his study of translations from English
to Swedish, found that subjects with informational content in English were often
translated into sentences with the pronoun det as subject, as in (7).
- A more frequent usage of clefts (Gundel 2002) and existential constructions (Ebeling 1999:
- has also been found Norwegian, a language which is closely related to Swedish and which
also has a V2 constraint.