3. Adverbial semi-insubordination constructions in Swedish: Synchrony and diachrony
Karin Beijering, Muriel Norde · 2019
The term ‘adverbial semi-insubordination’ refers to constructions with subordinate word order that differ from regular clause combining constructions. In a Swedish sentence such as kanske att han inte kommer ‘maybe that he not comes’, the presence of the subordinator att as well as the position of the sentence adverb inte ‘not’ suggests that we are dealing with a subordinate clause, yet this clause is not preceded by a full matrix, but by an epistemic adverb alone. The construction is found in several European languages and has been puzzling syntacticians for decades. Attempts to account for adverbial semi-insubordination are generally tied to a specific syntactic framework, with the unsurprising result that there is little consensus on the syntactic status of either the epistemic adverb or the att-clause. In this paper, we argue that the phenomenon can only be fully understood from a diachronic perspective. Focusing on Swedish, we will first present corpus data of adverbial semi-insubordination in Modern Swedish. Subsequently, we will zoom in on the historical development of the most frequent epistemic adverb in this construction, kanske ‘maybe’, which derives from the VP kan ske ‘can happen’.