Are there arguments for the subject analysis of Mainland Scandinavian presentational sentences?

Abstract

The Mainland Scandinavian languages have a productive presentational construction with an expletive and an indefinite "logical subject". The topic of this paper is the syntactic function of the logical subject. In traditional grammar, it was considered a (kind of) grammatical subject. Askedal (1982) and Platzack (1983) argued that it is a grammatical object, and this is a common view in Scandinavian grammar. The purpose of the paper is to defend this analysis against attacks, and argue that there are no acceptable arguments that the logical subject is a grammatical subject.