Sentence level constructions were discussed in the very beginning of the establishment of the CxG-framework (Fillmore et al. 1988), and since then a lot of research has been made on argument structure (Goldberg 1995, Perek 2015). However, the most abstract sentence pat- terns for main and subordinate clauses in the Scandinavian languages has not yet been thoroughly investigated and widely accepted in the CxG community, which has also been pointed out by researchers from other fields, claiming that CxG is mainly interested in the periphery of lan- guage phenomena (Michaelis 2012). Convinced that CxG is capable of accounting for abstract sentence patterns, I want to show that this is possible by presenting my master’s thesis (Strandberg 2019), in which 

the two constructions left-dislocation (ld-cxn) and hanging scene (hs- cxn) are investigated and described as attribute-value matrices in a Sign-Based Construction Grammar (Sag 2012).

ld-cxn is a grammatical structure appearing in many languages and oc- curs when a main or subordinate clause is preceded by a phrase corres- ponding to a pronominal or an adverbial copy inside that clause, see (1). The fact that the first phrase in (1) is preceding the clause, not constitut- ing a part of it, makes the example acceptable in Swedish and other verb-second languages, where only one phrase may be placed before the finite verb. Therefore, in written Swedish, the hs-cxn in (2) may seem odd. In this example, there is no adverb inside the clause corresponding to the initial adverbial phrase, which has the information-structural status scene. hs-cxn often occurs in spoken Swedish and consists of an initial adverbial phrase constituting the scene for the main clause, which is mostly not inverted.

(1)  [Torun,]ld [hon]copy hade aldrig åkt tunnelbana i hela sitt liv. “Torun, she had never taken the subway in her entire life.”(2)  [När vi träffades,]fia han hade ju aldrig tiggt på tunnelbanan i hela sitt liv.

“When we met, he had never begged on the subway in his whole life.” (Example from Swedish TV)

A number of Swedish studies has investigated ld-cxn, i.e. the Swedish Academy grammar (SAG 1999, see also Platzack 2010, Josefsson 2012, Holmberg 2019 to appear), but the characteristics of ld-cxn accounted for in SAG and other studies are not in line with the result in Strandberg (2017, 2019), showing that there is more variation to be accounted for, and that a majority of ld-cxns in Swedish can be summarized in three sentence patterns. hs-cxn on the other hand is only scarcely mentioned in the literature but can also be described as a construction in the same way as ld-cxn. As hs-cxn shows a lot of resemblance with ungrammat- ical Swedish main clauses where the verb-second rule is not followed, it needs to be fully investigated to show why it is not ungrammatical. In this talk, I will account for the results in Strandberg (2019), and thereby show the relevance of CxG-accounts of sentence-level constructions for the theoretical development of CxG-theory and for the practical con- structicography work.

References

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matical constructions: the case of let alone. Language 64, 501–538. Goldberg, A. E. 1995. Constructions: A construction grammar approach to argu-

ment structure. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Holmberg, A. 2019 (to appear). On the bottleneck hypothesis of V2. In T. Bib-

erauer & S. Wolfe (eds.), Reconsidering verb second.Josefsson, G. 2012. What’s first? On the left periphery in Swedish declaratives.

In J. Brandtler et al. (eds.) Discourse and grammar. A festschrift in honor of Valéria Molnár, 411–431. Lund: Centre for Languages and Literature, Lund University.

Michaelis, L. A. 2012. Making the case for construction grammar. In H. C. Boas & I. A. Sag (eds.), Sign-based construction grammar, 31–67. Stanford: CSLI.

Perek, F. 2015. Argument structure in usage-based construction grammar. Experi- mental and corpus-based perspectives. Amsterdam: Benjamins.

Platzack, C. 2010. Den fantastiska grammatiken. En minimalistisk beskrivning av svenskan. Stockholm: Norstedts.

SAG = Teleman, U., S. Hellberg & E. Andersson 1999. Svenska Akademiens gram- matik. Stockholm: Norstedts Ordbok.

Sag, I. A. 2012. Sign-based construction grammar: an informal synopsis. In H. C. Boas & I. A. Sag (eds.), Sign-based construction grammar, 69–202. Stanford: CSLI.

Strandberg, V. 2017. Syntaktiska perspektiv på initiala annex i talspråket. Kandi- datuppsats i svenska språket. Göteborg: Institutionen för svenska språket, Göteborgs universitet.

Strandberg, Viktoria. 2019a. Initiala annex i en teckenbaserad konstruktionsgram- matik. Magisteruppsats i svenska språket. Göteborg: Institutionen för svens- ka språket, Göteborgs universitet.

Strandberg, Viktoria. 2019b. Initiala annex i en teckenbaserad konstruktionsgram- matik. Göteborg: Institutionen för svenska språket, Göteborgs universitet.