En kvantitativ-distributionel syntaktisk analyse af genoptaget fundament

This paper investigates the so-called ‘left extra-position’ (Eng. ‘left-dislocation’) in Danish: men Lisbeth hun forstod at snøre dem ’but Lisbeth she knew how to fool them’, with the primary constituent Lisbeth in the left extra-position and a resumptive pronoun in prefield position. The paper analyses 1281 sentences with a structural possibility for left extra-position. The main results are: (1) Adverbial clauses almost always occur in left extra-position although short sentential adverbs can occur in the prefield position; (2) subject and circumstantial adverbials occur in left extra-position the longer or ‘heavier’ they are, i.e., the more words they contain; (3) short ‘summarizing’ adverbials such as ellers ‘otherwise’ and eller også ‘or also’ occur more frequently in left extra-position than sentential adverbials such as selvfølgelig ‘of course’, which due to the mono-lexemic status cannot be due to length. The latter result has not been mentioned in previous descriptions of left extra-position in Danish.