The pragmatics and syntax of pronoun preposing

Abstract Preposed pronouns have a dual role of both connecting the utterance to context and serving as its starting point. While central understanding restrictions on syntactic movement left periphery, this type fronting has often been overlooked. We provide an analysis pragmatics syntax Swedish pronoun preposing based study spontaneously produced spoken language from Nordic Dialect Corpus . find that there is strong preference for function switch topics it also possible prepose continued topics, but in neither case obligatory. argue these sentence-external relations topic are not encoded periphery Swedish, reflect pragmatic strategies discourse progression. The types (switch or continued) furthermore shown correlate with prosodic realization pronoun. A key feature our we distinguish preposed phrase sentence-internal providing aboutness utterance. adopt proposed by Holmberg, where FinP acts bottleneck, only one, syncretic, Force-Topic head above Fin. fact see evidence one position subject sets apart German Italian they analyzed e.g. Frey Frascarelli Hinterhölzl, does $$'$$ ′ -movement imply any particular marking.