Grammatical function selection in Swedish object shift

Object shift, the word order where light object pronouns precede sentential adverbs, has received a lot of attention since it was first described in the theoretical literature in Holmberg (1986). The early studies discussed basic syntactic and prosodic conditions on this word order. More recently researchers have investigated pragmatic and information structural constraints on when object shift can or cannot apply. In this paper we take a syntactic approach following a proposal in Orsnes (2013). After having carried out a survey of which types of verbs allow or disallow object shift in Swedish, we propose a generalization in terms of subcategorization. We find that object shift is possible, modulo information structural restrictions, with verbs that subcategorize for the closed functions OBJ and COMP but not with raising verbs that subcategorize for the open function XCOMP.