MATCHING Phrases in Norwegian Object Shift

Abstract

One significant contribution of generative linguistics has been to our understanding of 'movement,' which occurs when a word is linearized in a position different from where it is interpreted. Even though movement often is considered a syntactic phenomenon, some cases seem best analyzed prosodically, such as pronoun post-posing in Irish (Bennett, Elfner, & McClosky 2016). We explore prosodically driven movement in Norwegian, which is known for having pronominal object shift (OS). We show that OS can be explained by Match Theory (Selkirk 2009, 2011), but only if the MATCH constraints are sensitive to lexical items and their projects instead of Elfner's (2012) definition where Match is sensitive to lexical and functional elements and their projections (see also Ito & Mester 2019).