Out of focus : the Norwegian presentational construction in the mirror of French

Abstract

The aim of this thesis is to investigate the concept of presentational focus and examine its relevance in the Norwegian presentational construction (PC), as compared with French. The information structure in the presentational construction is associated with the introduction of a noun phrase (NP) argument, which serves as the ‘presented’ focus. According to current research, the presentational sentences such as locative inversion and PCs are driven by the requirement of realizing presentational focus. This requirement overrides the linking mismatch caused by the fact that many unergative verbs can appear in the Norwegian and French PC. The problem with this claim is that even if French seems to allow a rather wide range of verbs in the construction, the amount of verbs actually used is nevertheless far from comparable with the range of verbs used in Norwegian PCs. The presentational constructions which are often cited in the linguistic literature are quite rare and even unacceptable for many speakers of French. So even if there are many verbs that can, in principle, occur in the presentational construction, in practice they usually do not. The different verb distribution in French and Norwegian is due to the presentational construction’s different communicative functions in the two languages. By looking at the Norwegian PC in terms of theticity I show that many of the grammatical properties associated with the PC are due to non-topicality rather than focus. By examining the focus assignment in Norwegian PCs, I show that the construction has two functions: an entitive and an eventive. This reflects the fact that the PC in Norwegian not only introduces a new referent on the scene, but also has the opportunity to stress the activity denoted by the verb. French PCs on the other hand, are essentially entitive. The conclusion is that analyses that treat the presentational construction only as the presentation of an NP argument that constitutes the focus of the sentence, fail to capture these cross-linguistic differences between PCs.