Adverbials in Extra-left position in spoken Danish

The article describes the distribution of fronted adverbial constituents in Danish in the Prefield and the Extra-left (‘left dislocation’) positions: i morgen skal vi i skole vs. i morgen der skal vi i skole ‘tomorrow we go to school’. The data, 635 sentences with a fronted adverbial, are extracted from seven sociolinguistic interviews. The article shows that some types of adverbials are more liable to occur in the Extra-left position than others. Conditional clauses and når-clauses (‘when’) occur almost always in the Extra-left position. Attitude and manner adverbials like heldigvis ‘luckily’ and traditionelt ‘traditionally’ occur infrequently in Extra-left position. Contrary to what has been suggested in the literature, a principle of lexical weight does not have much explanatory power. Instead, grammatical principles and principles related to informational backgrounding provide explanations for the distribution.