Subjects, indefiniteness and adverbials. Textual structure and syntax in Early Old Swedish

The main goal of this dissertation is to explain the significance of text-internal cohesion for syntactic variation in relation to the subject, adverbials of time and place, and indefiniteness in Early Old Swedish (ca. 1225-1375). The means of creating cohesion examined are information structure and reference. Information structure refers to the organization of the information contained in the clause on the basis of its newness and familiarity. Information structure is examined especially in relation to the structure of the indefinite subject and its position in the clause and in relation to clause-initial adverbials of time and place. The term reference means a linguistic technique by which a known referent or something closely connected to its meaning is referred to again in a text. The dissertation examines what kinds of lexical and grammatical referential relations form around indefinite referents.

The research data consist of law texts, religious prose, and metrical texts. The most central data are the law texts, particularly the Law of Uppland, passed in 1296. The first study in the dissertation is primarily a quantitative overview; in the other three studies the methods are mainly qualitative.

The dissertation shows that word order in Early Old Swedish primarily follows information structure principles rather than syntactic ones. This is seen in the data particularly in the great variation in the position of the subject. This type of flexibility in word order gradually disappeared from the Swedish language as information structure principles began to be applied as syntactic rules. Information structure is also a central explanation for why adverbials of time and place are often clause-initial. The clause-initial placement of adverbials in law texts is clearly connected to features that previous research has defined primarily and often exclusively as typical stylistic traits for the genre.

The results of the analysis of reference, in turn, make a contribution not only to linguistic knowledge, but also to the understanding of the medieval society. Male persons are more often introduced as subjects and referred to by grammatical means, while women are defined by their relationships to male persons and referred to by lexical means.