LFG and expletives

[Helge Lødrup]

--
Dear Nina

This is really an excellent choice of a dissertation topic. There is
so much that we don't understand concerning expletives, from the more
basic question of different kinds of expletives and expletivity, and
to the more technical questions like how to treat them in LMT.

I have a couple of pages on the basic stuff at the end of my
Functional Structure (on my web page). There might also be something
useful in my article

Linking and Optimality in the Norwegian Presentational Focus
Construction. Nordic Journal of Linguistics  22, 2 1999, Pp. 205-229

By the way, did you know that some Norwegian dialects have a word
that can only be used as an expletive (and not as an adverb or
pronoun)? This is mentioned in

Van der Beek, Leonoor and Gerlof Bouma. 2004. The Role of the Lexicon
in Optimality Theoretic Syntax. To appear in: Miriam Butt and Tracy
Holloway King (eds.), Proceedings of the LFG'04 Conference. CSLI
Publications.

If you want to compare with other languages, the Finnish situation is
fascinating. An interesting minimalist article is

Holmberg, Anders  and Urpo Nikanne Expletives, Subjects and Topics in
Finnish. In Peter Svenonius (ed.) Subjects, expletives, and the EPP.
Oxford UP, 2002. Pp. 71-105

Best, Helge

--------------------------------------
Professor Helge Lodrup
Department of Linguistics, University of Oslo
Pb 1102, Blindern, N-0317 Oslo, Norway

E-mail: helge.lodrup at ilf.uio.no
Home page: http://folk.uio.no/helgelo/index.html