Position versus function in Scandinavian presentational constructions

In some theoretical approaches, grammatical relations are assumed to be defined structurally, so that the crucial clue to the grammatical relation of an element is its position in the tree. Lexical Functional Grammar, in contrast, does not assume a universal one-to-one mapping between structural position and grammatical relation — though grammatical relations may well be defined structurally in some languages. This means that in languages which do not rely solely on structure, the grammatical relation of a particular element has to be established on grounds other than structure. In this paper, we look in particular at the association between postverbal position and objects. We consider postverbal noun phrases in an information-structurally marked construction in the Scandianvian languages, often referred to as the presentational construction. These postverbal noun phrases have been analysed as objects — largely on positional grounds — in transformational theories and also within LFG analyses. Analysing them as objects does, however, raise a number of problems, in particular in that they lack some crucial object properties and have some properties typical of subjects. In this paper, we provide evidence against an object analysis and formulate an analysis within which the postverbal noun phrase is a subject.