ELLERHUR and other Yes/No-question operator candidates in Swedish
David Petersson, Gunlög Josefsson · Lund University Publications (Lund University) · 2010
Our point of departure is a new use of the question tag eller hur (or how) „isn‟t it?‟ in Swedish: (i) Eller hur ska vi åka till Italien i sommar? or how shall we go to Italy in summer „We will go to Italy this summer,. won‟t we?‟ We argue that eller hur used in this way is an overt Yes/No-question operator, and that it patterns with visst and nog, which we propose are two other Yes/No-question operators in Swedish. We also discuss eller hur that combines with a that-clause, a configuration that yields a sentence that in most cases is construed as an ironic statement. We argue that this instance of eller hur is not a question operator, but what we term a non-verbal matrix, and furthermore that eller hur, followed by a that-clause, patterns with other non-verbal matrices with a similar meaning, such as visst „sure‟ and säkert „sure‟.