1. INTRODUCTION
The Swedish dialect of Västra Nyland (Finland) is notorious for the fact that a number of subject positions or subject-like positions could be filled with personal pronominal forms of the Oblique (Obl) type. The relevant constructions may be analyzed in two different ways: either as case incongruence, where the Accusative (Acc) form takes over subject functions, or as a system corresponding to modern French, where only unstressed pronouns (‘bound pronouns’) have inflected forms, and stressed pronouns (‘unbound pronouns’) have no inflection (the ‘unbound’ form often appears to be a stressed variant of the Acc, incidentally). Since the confrontation of these two interpretations of the situation is not at stake, the term ‘incongruence’ shall be used here.
Case incongruence is an important part of modern colloquial Danish, and it is creeping into modern colloquial Norwegian as well (Faarlund, Lie & Vanneboe Reference Faarlund, Lie and Vanneboe1997:318–323). In the Swedish-speaking part of Mainland Scandinavia, on the other hand, the only area with extensive case incongruence seems to have been Västra Nyland.Footnote 1 Thus, this special phenomenon occurs in an area which seems to be isolated from those parts of Mainland Scandinavia where case incongruence is otherwise attested. However, as I shall report, the case incongruence phenomena seem to have been lost in recent generations. This raises the question of why the phenomenon came into existence, and why it has been lost again. It seems unlikely that structural reasons were at work. If it were so, why is Västra Nyland the only part of the Swedish domain where such case alternations came into existence? Even in southern Sweden, under Danish rule up to 1658, examples with case incongruence are not found. When such examples are tested with southern Swedish informants, they are not recognized at all, indicating that the incongruence pattern is foreign to the idiom.
In a paper on the parallel English situation, Emonds (Reference Emonds, Braeme, Contreras and Newmeyer1986) claims that once these phenomena of incongruence have been introduced, it becomes impossible for the children to reach a sufficient input to re-establish the traditional norm of congruence. The situation of Västra Nyland demonstrates that Emonds cannot be fully right in this; but I shall suggest that Emonds's theses are a clue to the understanding of the actual recordable facts about the Mainland Scandinavian case incongruence.
It is interesting that early discussions of the dialect neglect the use of non-subject forms in subject or subject-like positions. Descriptions of the dialect, beginning with Hipping (Reference Hipping1846) and Freudenthal (Reference Freudenthal1870), do not deal with syntax to any large extent; still it is surprising that case incongruence is not noted here. However, in Danish dialect descriptions from this period we observe that case incongruence also may pass unnoticed, although there is no reason to assume that the phenomenon did not exist when the descriptions were prepared. In Danish dialects, case incongruence must have been well-established much earlier, since traces of incongruence may be found in the written standard language already in the 17th century (Jørgensen Reference Jørgensen2000:173).
On the other hand, Lundström's (Reference Lundström1939) dissertation on Swedish dialect syntax in southern Finland gives a wealth of documentation of the use of incongruence in Västra Nyland. Since then, Nyholm (Reference Nyholm1986) has confirmed some of the phenomena. Lundström says that her investigations began in 1928; she gives the age of the informants as between 60 and 102 years, which means that some of them may have met Freudenthal when they were young.
In order to test Lundström's claims, I conducted some fieldwork in Västra Nyland during 1994. In the field work I elicited data with different informants with the aid of a questionnaire set up mainly with examples collected from Lundström's book; where such examples were not present, sentences modeled on Danish patterns were used. At that time, nobody used the constructions observed by Lundström anymore, but I encountered several locals who remembered older people using such forms. I investigated how likely they found several constructions. This is of course nothing like real evidence, but for want of better, it is the only clue to some problems of analysis. Most people I contacted were local speakers with an academic education, some younger, some middle-aged. Two others were more like genuine dialect informants, having lived locally most of their lives and having no education beyond what the local communities offered. Their estimations were of course most important for the evaluation of the problems in hand.
The present investigation into the Västra Nyland dialect confronts Lundström's Reference Lundström1939 data with the 1994 data. Before we can analyze the material, two theoretical points have to be clarified: the morphological material and the syntactic constructions in which incongruence occurs.
2. ESTABLISHING WHAT A CASE FORM IS
Before we enter into discussion of the syntactic constructions, it is important to note that not all personal pronouns in Mainland Scandinavian have two case forms. The pattern of Västra Nyland is illustrated in Table 1. The actual forms in the table are collected from Lundström; the forms given in Freudenthal (Reference Freudenthal1870) follow the same distributional pattern, but are recorded in a somewhat different phonetic form.
Table 1. Case forms of Västra Nyland after Freudenthal (Reference Freudenthal1870) and Lundström (Reference Lundström1939).
a This form is not found in Freudenthal's inventories; Lundström (Reference Lundström1939:56) supposes that it relies on influence from the standard language(s), Standard Swedish or Standard Finland-Swedish.
This paradigm displays separate forms for Nominative (Nom) and Obl in the 1st and 2nd person singular and plural, but in the 3rd person the Nom forms may also be used in Obl positions. Some 3rd person forms, like honon or henna, are reserved for Obl use. This corresponds rather well to the situation in northern Mainland Scandinavia, where case inflection in the 3rd person pronouns is at best unclear, and in many cases absent (see Jørgensen Reference Jørgensen2000: Chapter 6). When the pronominal case system of Mainland Scandinavian was reduced from a three-case system (Nominative – Accusative – Dative) to a two-case system (Nominative – Oblique), reorganization of paradigms sometimes kept the old 3rd person masculine Acc han, and in some cases the Dative form honom. When han was the preferred form, the distinction ‘Nom|Obl’ was blurred within the system, and the consequence was that case distinctions in the 3rd person were often lost. In the following examples, 1st and 2nd person Obl forms in subject-related positions count as evidence for case incongruence. Some examples with honon or henna are also quoted, although with the reservation that all 3rd person forms may instead be case-neutral forms. In this respect Danish seems to have the best-functioning case inflection of pronouns (maybe because the widespread and systematic functional incongruences gave the case-inflected forms a new lease on life).
3. INCONGRUENT CONSTRUCTIONS IN ENGLISH AND DANISH
Incongruent forms in English and Danish are found in constructions where the personal pronouns are deictic rather than anaphoric, i.e. they indicate that the referent of the pronoun is new to the context, whereas anaphors refer to the immediate context (Togeby Reference Togeby2003:144–147). In Danish, deictic pronouns are regularly stressed (Brink & Lund Reference Brink and Lund1975:663), a conventional sign of the deictic status. The focus is on the semantic function, not the stress, since several constructions in modern Danish have obligatory or facultative stress on personal pronouns, yet retain Nom (Hansen & Lund 1983:27–32). A systematic distinction between anaphoric and deictic pronoun forms is found in modern French (Riegel, Pellat & Rioul Reference Riegel, Pellat and Rioul1994:199–202), where it has been an accepted part of the normative grammar for a long time, despite the fact that such a distinction has no correspondence in Latin.
Whether this distinction between stressed and unstressed forms was also present in Västra Nyland is difficult to prove in the absence of recordings or longer text passages, but judging from the examples it seems plausible. In a wider context, the distinction between purely anaphoric and deictic uses of the pronouns in English, Danish and Västra Nyland Swedish is a part of the fact that these languages demand clitics to fill both subject and object positions (Chomsky Reference Chomsky1981:275–278). The clitics, i.e. unstressed anaphoric pronouns, correspond to the ‘dropped pros’ of e.g. Italian or Latin, and the stressed deictic variants to those pronouns that are actually present. This distribution had already been observed by Kuen (Reference Kuen1957) in his analysis of the ‘obligatorium’ of Germanic and Romance pronominal systems. Languages with such an obligatorium (‘non pro-drop’) may develop different forms for deictic and anaphoric pronominal use. French has done so; case inflection is retained with the anaphoric forms, but the bound forms have only one case-neutral form. Spoken English and Danish may be analyzed in the same way. Swedish (with the exception of Västra Nyland) has not done so, and within Norway some areas distinguish stressed and unstressed forms, while others do not.
Emonds (Reference Emonds, Braeme, Contreras and Newmeyer1986:96) gives the following list of incongruent constructions in English, reproduced here with some of his examples of normal spoken (but not written) standard:
Conjoined subjects
(1) Mary and him are late.
(2) Sometimes her and us are late.
Subjects of understood predicates
(3) Everybody but them gets on John's nerves.
(4) Students smarter than her get no scholarship.
Predicate nominals
(5) Mary has a nice life, but you could never be her now.
(6) It is just us who John says are late.
First person demonstratives
(7) Us commuters are often blamed for smog.
(8) How much would us with insurance have to pay?
Appositives to subjects
(9) Judy thinks that the best math student, namely her, ought to get a scholarship.
(10) My twins say that the three New Yorkers, Mary and them, know the most about art.
In modern Colloquial Danish many of the same constructions are found (see Parrott Reference Parrott2009). The actual system of the Danish constructions has to be described in a somewhat different way in order to account for specific positions (Jørgensen Reference Jørgensen2000:106–107). This system distinguishes three kinds of positions (incongruent case forms are in bold).Footnote 2
3.1 Direct subject positions obligatorily filled with Obl forms
3.1.2 Subjects in elliptic sentences (subgroup of Emonds's ‘subjects of understood predicates’)Footnote 4
(13)
(14)
3.2 Positions with congruence to the subject
3.2.1 Predicate nominals (cp. (5)–(6) above)
(15)
(16)
3.2.2 Pronouns as existential subjects
(17)
(18)
3.2.3 Subjects in stressed right dislocation (right copying)
This construction is not found within the Danish-speaking area, but is frequent in northern Scandinavia (see Askedal Reference Askedal, Lilius and Saari1987). Here is a (congruent) Norwegian example:
(19)
3.3 Positions where the incongruence is determined by syntactic factors other than subjecthood
3.3.1 Comparisons with conjunctions (subgroup of Emonds's ‘subject of understood predicates’, cp. (3)–(4) above)
(20)
(21)
3.3.2 Conjoined subjects (cp. (1)–(2) above)
(22)
(23)
3.3.3 Pronouns as nucleus of a heavy NP construction (this group includes Emonds's group ‘1st person demonstratives’)
Heavy NP constructions are of three types in Danish: the heavy element may be a relative clause, an adjunct adverb phrase or prepositional phrase, or an apposition.
(24)
(25)
(26)
3.3.4 (Unstressed) pronouns as determiners in NP groups
This group displays strong similarities to certain subtypes like (26), but is different from those due to the stress pattern, the pronoun being unstressed. In the former type, the pronoun takes a full NP as its appositive, whereas in the latter the pronoun acts as the determiner of NP.Footnote 6 In contrast to the constructions above, this type has a preference for Nom.
(27)
Jørgensen's typology is used in the investigation of the Västra Nyland dialect in order to acquire the most detailed picture of actual use.
4. SYNTACTIC CONSTRUCTIONS WITH CASE INCONGRUENCE IN VÄSTRA NYLAND
In this section, the constructions found in Lundström (Reference Lundström1939) are confronted with the results of interviews with the informants of Västra Nyland. Lundström mentions the following constructions as having case incongruence in this dialect.
4.1 Predicate nominals (cp. Section 3.2.1 above)
Pronouns in the function of predicate to the subject are in Obl.Footnote 7
(28)
(29)
In (29), the 3rd person form is normally understood as Obl, but it contrasts in an interesting way with the fact that the (etymologically nominative) form ωn (un) is used in a position normally associated with Obl functions later in the same sentence (see also example (72) below). All relevant examples in Lundström's book have the Obl form, with one exception:
(30)
Whether this relies on influence from Swedish standard, or whether it is genuine in the dialect, is difficult to determine.
In my interviews, most people recognized these constructions, but not all of them. One of the most authentic speakers of the dialect reacted negatively to the following constructed example:
(31)
Such evidence would normally weigh strongly against the authenticity of the construction. However, quite a number of other informants remembered such constructions, so there is no reason to doubt the description in Lundström's work.
4.2 Stressed right copying of the subject
This construction is typical of northern Mainland Scandinavian, but is hardly found in Danish. Instead Danish uses more heavy designations for the right copying of the subject. Lundström (Reference Lundström1939:56) claims that the use of the Obl form is mandatory in this context in Västra Nyland, as seen in (32)–(34).
(32)
(33)
(34)
However, Nom is also recorded by Lundström:
(35)
(36)
(37)
Finally Lundström gives an example with both Nom and Obl case, in spite of the fact that the two case forms are otherwise always distinct:
(38)
A local informant provided me with this version during field work in 1994:
(39)
Interestingly, Nyholm (Reference Nyholm1986:210) states that he knows such expressions quite well from comments, but in spite of the fact that he has lived in the area, he has never heard this construction personally.Footnote 8 Possibly this construction is not productive, but some kind of idiom.Footnote 9
Everybody in my 1994 field work (except the youngest informants) remembered constructions of this type with Obl forms and found them typical of the older stages of the dialect. Thus, there is no doubt that Lundström's description was accurate.
4.3 Comparisons with conjunctions
In Modern Swedish, comparisons may be constructed using both Nom and Obl forms without syntactic government. The same holds for Västra Nyland. Most examples in Lundström's book have the Obl case:
(40)
(41)
(41)
Lundström (Reference Lundström1939:56) claims that the Obl case is the norm, which matches many other Swedish dialects. There are some exceptions in her material:
(43)
A few examples were included in the questionnaire for the field work, all with Obl forms (including types where Standard Swedish demands Nom). The informants generally held them to be typical of an older generation.
4.4 Conjoined noun phrases
Lundström makes no explicit statement regarding this construction, but there are several examples. Often they display both Nom and Obl forms, seemingly without a clear pattern. First I shall give some examples where the case-neutral (h)an occurs next to the Obl-only forms (h)onon and (h)enna. Please note that both (h)an and (h)onon may occur in the same construction in (45) and (46):
(44)
(45)
(46)
In the 1st person, both cases may occur in conjoined phrases regardless of their syntactic function:
(47)
(48)
(49)
Some examples display Nom in right-copying positions:
(50)
In the interviews, these examples were held to be in line with the old norms, with the exception of (48), where the conjoined Obl subject is in a clear subject position. Apparently the position in left or right copying is more acceptable. Remarkably, (48) was held to be acceptable by the younger informants, whereas the older informants (including the dialect speakers) tended to discard this example.
A possible explanation is that the dialect of Västra Nyland – just like Danish – had no absolute rule concerning coordination. The examples could be understood in such a way that coordination is influenced by the context. In coordination appearing in a direct subject position, Nom is more likely, whereas in right copying, where Obl form is the norm for single pronouns, there will be a predisposition for Obl forms. The investigation of such structures demands an authentic corpus, but it seems to be too late for this in Västra Nyland.
4.5 Pronouns as the nucleus of a heavy NP construction
4.5.1 With a relative clause
Lundström also has no clear statement in this case. With dislocated pronouns, Nom seems to have been the standard. Lundström gives a few examples with 3rd person masculine, where no clear case distinction is present.
(51)
(52)
When the pronoun is a predicate nominal, an Obl form should be the norm (see above). This also seems to hold in cases where Standard Swedish demands Nom:
(53)
(54)
(55)
(56)
(57)
The informants did in no way agree on such examples. Interestingly, though, examples that also correspond to Standard Swedish were rejected. Thus, we cannot claim that the Obl form was standard in this construction, but some kind of tendency may have made itself felt.
4.5.2 With an adverb P or a PP as post-modification
Lundström gives no relevant examples. Two possible types modeled on Danish patterns were used in the field work to elicit the data: one type with the construction in a direct subject position (shown in (58) and (60) below), and one with the construction in a left-copying position (shown in (59) and (61)).
(58)
(59)
(60)
(61)
The last three examples were in fact accepted by the dialect speakers (but again, not as part of their language, but as possible parts of previous stages). The other informants in the field work were very hesitant to accept such constructions.
Only one example with an adverb attached was tested:
(62)
This example split my informants, some accepting it, others rejecting it. It is fair to assume that such examples were at most marginal.
4.5.3 With an apposition
Once more, Lundström has no clear-cut examples of this construction. It was tested in two versions: one with the pronoun plus apposition in a direct subject position (see (63a) and (64a)), and one with the pronoun plus apposition in a left dislocation (see (63b) and (64b)) The examples were rejected by all informants, except one of the dialect speakers:
(63)
(64)
One case of a pronoun in front of a personal name is found in Lundström's material:
(65)
Such a construction could reflect the northern Scandinavian usage of pronouns in front of personal names as a kind of article; in such a case they would not belong here. Freudenthal (Reference Freudenthal1870:85,102) claims that this usage was present in his day, but unless (65) is an example of this usage, the feature had disappeared when Lundström's data collection took place.Footnote 10
4.6 Constructions not found in Lundström's material
4.6.1 Pronominal subject in long extractions
Long extractions of adjuncts out of embedded clauses are attested, as shown in (66):
(66)
In Danish extracted pronominal subjects must have the Obl form. Since no example of extracted subjects is found in Lundström's book, it must remain an open question how the Västra Nyland dialect handled this. In the field work, such examples were thought to be strange, but one of the dialect speakers was inclined to recognize the following constructed example:
(67)
Since such examples seem to be possible in Närpes, Southern Ostrobothnia, Finland (Jørgensen Reference Jørgensen2000:226), it cannot be ruled out that such constructions were once current in Västra Nyland as well.
4.6.2 Subjects in an ellipsis
Lundström has no examples of this type, and examples like (68) elicited little positive response during the field work:
(68)
This pattern, very typical of modern Danish case incongruence, thus seems not to belong to the Västra Nyland dialect.
4.7 Other constructions
Two remarkable examples from Lundström display the purely Obl form of the otherwise case-neutral 3rd person in overt subject positions:
(69)
(70)
These examples are enigmatic. They may display some kind of contrast, but at least for (70) this interpretation is unlikely. From Norwegian we know cases where originally Obl forms under certain circumstances become enclitic case-neutral forms (Papazian Reference Papazian and Hoff1978:266), but since the henna here is both pre- and post-verbal, this interpretation is not that plausible. The possibility that neutralization has given Obl forms access to subject positions (in addition to giving Nom forms access to non-subject positions) cannot be ruled out here.
Finally it is worth mentioning that this dialect has a few traces of a phenomenon which is also found in northern Sweden, namely the use of Nom forms in non-subject positions to mark contrast:
(71)
(72)
These examples are obviously stressed due to the presence of a long vowel in both pronouns. They are given without context, but still they seem to belong to the northern Swedish pattern.
5. DISCUSSION
The incongruence pattern of Västra Nyland looks very much like the Danish pattern, but differs in a number of ways. First of all, it seems that two types of Obl pronouns in direct subject positions (Section 3.1) have not been attested at all. Furthermore some of the most frequent positions of incongruent subjects in Västra Nyland were those that depended on local triggers, like coordinating conjunctions or the comparative conjunction. The incongruence effect is found only in the closest vicinity of these elements. In Danish the patterns with Obl forms in direct subject positions are obviously grammaticalized, the Obl forms being called for by structural relations, like the trace effect from the subject position in the embedded sentence to the matrix sentence (see Chomsky Reference Chomsky1981:79–85).
The question of how this dialect pattern came about is difficult to answer. Structural pressure seems unlikely, considering the fact that the Västra Nyland incongruence pattern is the only attested instance within the Swedish-speaking areas (Jörgensen Reference Jörgensen1970). Numerous theories (e.g. Johannessen Reference Johannessen1998, Schütze Reference Schütze2001, Quinn Reference Quinn2005 or Parrott Reference Parrott2009) state that the Obl is a default case in a language like English; yet neither standard nor non-standard Swedish is yielding to the supposed pressure from the default case, in spite of the fact that Swedish – from a structural point of view – should be in the same position as English, having a closely related kind of grammar. The same argument holds more strongly in comparison with Danish. Danish and Swedish grammatical structures are extremely closely related, and yet Danish has an inclination towards Obl forms in certain positions, whereas all kinds of Swedish, including the spoken standards, have nothing of this kind (cp. Jørgensen Reference Jørgensen2000: Chapter 8). Indeed, if there is some pressure from the grammatical system of the vernacular, it could be an association of Acc or Obl forms with ‘new information’, an association that would eventually lead to a re-interpretation of the grammatical forms. Jensen (Reference Jensen2011) demonstrates that such a tendency actually caused some re-grammaticalization of Acc forms in late East Danish medieval sources.
Although not explicit about this, Emonds (Reference Emonds, Braeme, Contreras and Newmeyer1986) seems to take the grammatical structure of languages like English, Danish and Swedish to be at a point of balance. They could succumb to pressure toward case incongruence with a preference for the Obl form, like English and Danish, or they could stick to the Nom, like Swedish does. If the incongruence gains foothold, reversal should be impossible, according to Emonds. Emonds's way of thinking underlines the importance of the social factor, indicating that the reason for the change in Västra Nyland was not a pressure from within, but the effect of some social factor, for instance language contact.
If we try to pursue the contact possibility, we must rule out influence from Danish; there is no attested case of relevant language contacts in this area during the periods when Danish developed these patterns. However, we have information about English and Belgian iron workers being employed at the first iron works of Fiskars as early as the 17th century.Footnote 11 Incongruence patterns are attested for English and French from this period (Jespersen Reference Jespersen1891; Nyrop Reference Nyrop1925:218). Native speakers of English and French could easily have brought incongruence patterns with them from their native languages, and it is conceivable that they also imported these patterns into their Swedish interim language. Since they had a special status due to their skills, their linguistic oddity could have crept into everyday speech in the surrounding community and remained there. This assumption about the period is not really contradicted by the fact that neither Hipping (Reference Hipping1846) nor Freudenthal (Reference Freudenthal1870) observed this usage. They could have missed it because they did not focus on syntax at all. Recall that some of Lundström's speakers were old enough to have been present when Freudenthal visited the area.Footnote 12
The incongruence patterns are totally lost in everyday speech in Västra Nyland today. All informants agreed on this, and no examples show up in my recordings. This loss is odd as well, since Emonds's (Reference Emonds, Braeme, Contreras and Newmeyer1986) claim that such patterns, once they are lost, cannot be reconstructed from the performance of other adult speakers, seems very likely. On the other hand, the linguistic input facing young people growing up in this area does not consist only of the adult speech around them. They encounter Standard Swedish patterns without incongruence in school, in mass media and in contacts with non-locals, and the congruent usage may be inferred from present-day Standard Swedish. The local speech community of Västra Nyland has definitely lost its power.
Thus, the most likely version of the story is that the speakers of Västra Nyland picked up these patterns because of speakers with a high social standing employing the patterns as a part of an interlanguage, and lost it again because new status persons came around who did not use the pattern.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This paper owes a great deal to continuous discussions over the years with Jeffrey Parrott. I would like to thank the participants at IClave 5 in Copenhagen 2009, where a first version was presented. Also I am grateful for many useful comments and suggestions from the NJL reviewers.
