Thematic constraints on presentational sentences in Icelandic and Swedish

In this article we report on a systematic comparison of presentational sentences in Icelandic and Swedish, looking in particular at possible thematic roles of the pivot and how they correlate with positional options. Despite some well-known differences between the languages (only Icelandic allows ‘high’ IP-pivots and pivots with agentive transitive verbs), it turns out that the restrictions on VP-pivots are similar, both in terms of roles and positions. VP-pivots have to be Themes, Paths or Performers and may co-occur with other DPs, but only if the pivot is the last DP argument. We show how these restrictions to some extent reflect the argument structure proposed in Platzack (2010). Although Swedish does not allow IP-pivots in general, pivots with incorporated negation can only appear in the IP, but are still subject to the same thematic constraints as VP-pivots. Presentational sentences need to be distinguished from other constructions that show certain similarities, including some Transitive Expletive Constructions in Swedish, discussed in Håkansson (2017).