1.1 Introduction

In this paper, we investigate a type of syntactic optionality found across languages: syntactic structures typically found in matrix clauses, but which are also available—although apparently not obligatory—in certain types of embedded environments. Since Hooper & Thompson (1973), building on seminal work by Emonds (1970), the received view is that such Main Clause Phenomena [MCP] are licensed by the kinds of interpretive properties typically associated with matrix clauses. In particular, the received view is that MCP are available in contexts associated with Illocutionary Force. However, pinpointing exactly what this association amounts to has proven a serious challenge for both theoretical and experimental work on this topic (see among many others Hooper 1975; Green 1976; Wechsler 1991; Holmberg & Platzack 1995; Gärtner 2000; 2002; Truckenbrodt 2006; Julien 2009; Wiklund et al. 2009; Bentzen 2010; Gärtner & Michaelis 2010; Haegeman & Ürögdi 2010; Wiklund 2010; Aelbrecht et al. 2012; Haegeman 2012; Jensen & Christensen 2013; Haegeman 2014; Julien 2015; Woods 2016a; b; Miyagawa 2017; Djärv et al. 2017). This paper presents new quantitative data addressing this question in the context of embedded V-to-C movement, or Verb Second—a type of MCP found across a variety of languages, including Mainland Scandinavian and several other Germanic languages. From this data, we argue that embedded V2 [EV2] is only licensed in contexts where the embedded proposition p is introduced into the conversation as entirely new information. This is to say that EV2 is unavailable in contexts where p has been previously discussed by the speaker and the hearer, regardless of whether or not p is mutually agreed on.

Scandinavian EV2 raises a number of questions for the study of syntactic optionality. While previous work on EV2 has reported judgments pointing to potential semantic-pragmatic factors driving the choice of EV2 vs. V-in situ, consensus has yet to be reached as to what precisely those factors are. One possibility, which we consider in this paper, is that any interpretive correlates are only apparent, and that the choice is in fact primarily driven by extra-grammatical factors. A case of this type involves so-called that-omission, or complementizer drop, in English, which Dayal & Grimshaw (2009) argues constitutes a type of MCP. However, both experimental (Ferreira & Dell 2000) and modeling (Roland, Elman & Ferreira 2006; Jaeger 2010) work shows that the choice of variant is largely predictable from processing factors.

Moreover, whatever the interpretive properties associated with EV2 turn out to be, it seems clear that they are not identical to those associated with certain other MCP (see examples in (3)). From the point of view of the syntax-meaning interface, the bigger empirical question is whether all MCP share the same interpretive (or distributional) properties, apart from their restricted occurrence in embedded environments. Studying EV2 in the context of theoretical and empirical claims about MCP is therefore important, as it brings us closer to answering the question of what it means to be an MCP, and what the unifying property is, if any. The same can also be said for studying Swedish EV2 in the context of theoretical and empirical claims about EV2 across languages; at the level of the interface of structure and meaning, is EV2 a unified phenomenon? The availability of large-scale naturally occurring data, makes Swedish EV2 particularly well-suited to address these different questions for a type of construction that is both marked and infrequent in speech.

A popular approach to EV2, going back to Hooper & Thompson’s now classical work, is to argue that embedded clauses with V2 order are asserted—although little consensus has been reached in the literature with respect to what it means for a sentence to be asserted (Grice 1957; Stalnaker 1974; 1978; et seq), or what specific notion of assertion is relevant to the licensing of EV2 (e.g. Andersson 1975; Green 1976; Wechsler 1991; Holmberg & Platzack 1995; Truckenbrodt 2006; Julien 2009; Wiklund 2010; Gärtner & Michaelis 2010; Jensen & Christensen 2013; Julien 2015; Woods 2016a; b). On the other hand, it has been argued that what actually matters for the licensing of EV2, and embedded MCP more generally, are lexical properties of the matrix predicate. However, no consensus has yet been reached regarding the type of lexical properties that determine or constrain the distribution of embedded MCP/V2 (see for instance Den Besten 1983; Weerman & de Haan 1986; Iatridou & Kroch 1992; Vikner 1995; De Haan 2001; Bentzen et al. 2007; Wiklund et al. 2009; De Cuba & Ürögdi 2009; 2010; Haegeman & Ürögdi 2010; Haegeman 2014; Kastner 2015). In this paper we argue, based on statistical data extracted from a series of large-scale written Swedish corpora, that the semantic-pragmatic notion driving the distribution of EV2 is discourse novelty; whether the embedded proposition is treated as discourse-old or new information. While this is fundamentally a pragmatic notion, it is nevertheless tightly constrained by lexical-semantic properties of the matrix predicate.

We additionally demonstrate the use of diagnostics to differentiate the various underlying factors which drive syntactic optionality. This is to highlight how the type of usage data presented in this paper can indeed inform our understanding of traditional grammatical representations rather than supplanting them. We argue that not all probabilistic output is a reflection of learned gradient cognitive representations; the type of usage data which has popularly been analyzed as resulting from either gradient underlying structure (Bybee 2006; Bresnan 2007) or psycholinguistic factors (Jaeger 2010) can (at least in this instance) be better understood as reflecting categorical grammatical representations and their interaction with discourse context.

The following sub-sections (§1.2–1.4) provide the theoretical and experimental background. Section 2.1 details the methods of our study. In Section 2.2 we consider a number of potentially relevant usage- or processing-based factors (Ferreira & Dell 2000; Bybee 2006; Jaeger 2010), which while not previously applied to EV2, nonetheless make testable predictions in this case. We show that, while stylistic factors such as formality play a clear role in conditioning the rates of EV2 across grammatical contexts, we do not find evidence supporting a processing or usage-based account. In Section 3, we discuss and test the predictions made by previous influential accounts regarding the type of lexical factors that influence the distribution of EV2. We find that, while certain aspects of the predictions made by these lexical licensing, or selection-based accounts are borne out, as they stand, these accounts are in themselves unable to account for the overall patterns in the data. Section 4 motivates and develops our theoretical account, whereby EV2 is licensed by discourse novelty. We show that this account makes novel predictions about the interaction of certain clause-embedding attitude verbs with matrix negation regarding the availability of EV2. Section 5 presents new experimental data from an acceptability judgment task, showing that these predictions are indeed borne out. Section 6 connects the experimental results back to related corpus data, providing further evidence in favor of our account. Section 7 concludes.

1.2 Main Clause Phenomena

Adding to the observation made by Emonds (1970), that certain types of syntactic structures appear to be confined to matrix clauses, Hooper & Thompson (1973) [H&T] argued that, additionally, certain classes of predicates (1), but not others (2), also allow for these structures in their complements.

Classic examples of English MCP include VP-preposing (3a), topicalization (3b), left/right-dislocation (3c).

The observation made by H&T, illustrated in (4) using VP-preposing, is that MCP appear to be possible in the complements of the predicates in (1), but not embedded under those in (2).

For EV2 declaratives,¹ the received view is that V2 is possible under the predicate classes in (1), but not under those in (2), as shown in (5). V-in situ, on the other hand, is the unmarked option, possible under all of the five predicate types in (1) and (2), as shown in (6). (V2 is diagnosed here by V≺Neg order, whereas V-in situ is identified by Neg≺V order; see Section 1.3.).

It’s worth noting, however, that these empirical claims are based on subtle judgments about the acceptability of the relevant sentences, and that their empirical status is still a matter of debate. For instance, regarding the availability of topicalization in English embedded declaratives, Bianchi & Frascarelli (2009) provide examples like that in (7), which was judged to be acceptable by 80% of their consultants (12/15), thus casting some doubt on the claim that emotive factives disallow MCP.

Here we probe this question in the context of Swedish EV2, which we briefly introduce in the following section.

1.3 Swedish embedded Verb Second

Syntactically, EV2 in Swedish involves movement of the finite verb to C.² Importantly, V-to-C languages are different from V-to-T languages. In the latter type, unlike in Swedish and other V-to-C languages, V_fin≺Neg order is obligatory in all tensed matrix and embedded clauses.³

In Swedish, which is SVO, it is not always clear from the surface constituent order whether a subject-initial clause has undergone V-to-C movement or not. This is because such movement often results in the same surface-order as a clause without movement, as shown in (8).⁴

In Swedish, there are two common diagnostics for identifying verb movement. The first is the presence of sentence adverb (including negation), occupying the left edge of vP, as shown in (9b). The second is the the presence of a topicalized or focused non-subject XP in Spec, CP (10).

As shown using these diagnostics in (10) and (11), V2 is obligatory in Swedish matrix clauses.

While EV2 is possible in certain embedded contexts, as shown in (5)–(6), it is by no means obligatory in these contexts, as shown in (12).

Next, we turn our focus to the interpretive effects typically associated with EV2, and MCP more broadly.

1.4 Interpreting MCP

The received view in the literature going back to Hooper & Thompson (1973) is that Main Clause Phenomena are associated with illocutionary force, the type of speech act associated with an utterance. For declaratives, assertion is the associated illocutionary force. Following Stalnaker (1974), a speaker asserting a proposition p minimally requires that:

It is uncontroversial that in uttering either sentence in (14), the speaker is typically asserting something about their beliefs, and not about John.

There does, however, exist a reading of (14b) on which the speaker is asserting the proposition that John stole the money. On this reading, the matrix clause “I believe…” plays a parenthetical role. As was observed already by H&T, the latter reading can be paraphrased using a slifting construction, as in (15).

Connecting the availability of MCP to the presence of illocutionary force would then nicely capture both their obligatory occurrence in matrix clauses, as well as their restricted availability in embedded clauses.

One popular way of encoding this connection between the syntax and the pragmatics is to say that MCP involve an extended C-domain that encodes illocutionary force (such as that in (16) from Rizzi 1997), as well as other discourse features like topic and focus. V-to-C movement is then argued to be triggered by interpretable features on Force.

This can be contrasted with clauses that disallow MCP, which involve a smaller, or “impoverished” C-domain, in (17), incompatible with illocutionary force, topicalization and focus, as well as with any movement to their dedicated positions in the left-periphery, including V-to-C.

A problem for this perspective arises, however, when we consider factive predicates like discover or realize.

On the classic view of assertion, given in (13), factive predicates are predicted to disallow embedded assertions, given that factives presuppose that p is true (Kiparsky & Kiparsky 1970; Keenan 1971; Karttunen 1971; 1974). This is because—on the received view of presupposition (Stalnaker 1974; Heim 1982; 1983; 1992)—for a sentence involving a factive predicate to be felicitous, p must be entailed by the context (the intersection of the propositions in the Common Ground; i.e., the worlds in which all of the propositions in the Common Ground are true). That is, p must already be part of the Common Ground. On this view then, factivity is incompatible with the second component of assertion, in (13b); the speaker attempting to add p to the Common Ground. As we saw above, however, V2 and other MCP have been observed to be possible in clauses embedded under at least the doxastic factives.

In contrast, some authors (e.g. De Cuba & Ürögdi 2009; 2010; Haegeman 2010; Haegeman & Ürögdi 2010; Haegeman 2012, and Kastner 2015), have nevertheless claimed—as would be expected given the standard views of factivity and assertion, respectively—that factive verbs as a class disallow MCP. This has been supported by data points such as the following:⁵

While the above authors take this to be a general empirical claim about MCP, it has gained less traction in the literature on EV2. To our awareness, the only authors to advance this claim are Truckenbrodt (2006) and Reis (1997) in the context of German EV2.⁸ It is nevertheless important to consider this view seriously for Swedish EV2, both in view of the general question of whether MCP constitute a homogeneous class, and in terms of the more specific question of the type of predicates that allow EV2, specifically in light of the conflicting nature of some of the empirical claims made regarding the distribution of MCP. We return to the question about the role of factivity, and address it empirically in Section 3.1.⁹

In accounting for their observation that the doxastic factives seem to allow MCP, Hooper & Thompson (1973: 481) claim that while these verbs are presuppositional in the traditional sense, the doxastic factives (like the speech act and doxastic non-factives), “have a parenthetical reading on which the complement proposition is considered the main assertion.” More recently, this idea has been taken up by Jensen & Christensen (2013) in the context of EV2. Rather than using the already theory-laden label of “assertion”, these authors have adopted the notion of the Main Point of the Utterance from Simons (2007). This is (roughly) the content of an utterance which most directly addresses the Question Under Discussion (Roberts 1996; 2012). As illustrated in (20), given the question in (20-Q), the Main Point of Utterance in both (20-A1) and (20-A2) is John is in New York.

As observed by Simons (2007), doxastic factives, like the speech act and non-factive doxastic predicates—but apparently unlike the emotive factives—allow the embedded clause to provide the Main Point of the Utterance.

The claim advanced by Jensen & Christensen (2013) is that it is this notion of Main Point content that distinguishes between those embedding environments that allow MCP, and those that do not. On this view, any observed predicate restriction on EV2 is essentially epiphenomenal, reflecting simply the relative ease with which a given predicate may function parenthetically.

This account, however, is problematic for purely empirical reasons. For instance, Wiklund et al. (2009) present judgment data showing that neither is V2 obligatory in these contexts, nor is it ruled out in a context where the embedded proposition is not the Main Point of the Utterance, as illustrated with the question-answer pair in (22).

According to Wiklund et al. (2009), this sentence, in the context of (22-Q), can either be read as ‘he didn’t come to the party because he wasn’t allowed to, as Kristine told me’, or ‘he didn’t come to the party because Kristine said that he wasn’t allowed to go’. However, on a strong version of this hypothesis, the second reading should not be available. On the alternative view advanced by Wiklund et al. (2009), a predicate will allow V2 in its complement if it also allows for the embedded proposition to be the Main Point of the Utterance, which, unlike previous authors, they take to be a matter of selection. Crucially then, there is no direct link between assertion and EV2. Rather, the predicates in (1) select for a larger CP, like that in (16), which is compatible with V-to-C movement, as well as with the illocutionary force of assertion. The predicates in (2) however, select for a smaller CP, as in (17), which they take to be compatible with neither V-to-C, nor with illocutionary force.

However, noting that the critical judgments are subtle and based on the intuitions of only a few speakers, Djärv, Heycock & Rohde (2017) tested experimentally whether participants’ judgments of acceptability for sentences with EV2 in Swedish were sensitive to this type of context manipulation. The form of the manipulation they used is illustrated with the English examples in (23). The prediction was that EV2 should be acceptable in contexts like (23a), but not in contexts like (23b).

Their experiment, which was a judgment study, manipulated Main Point status [matrix clause; embedded clause], predicate type [Speech Act; Doxastic Non-factive; Doxastic Factive; Emotive Factive], and word order (V≺Neg; Neg≺V). They found a main effect of word order such that V3 (subject-adverb-verb order) was rated overall higher than V2 (p < 0.001), as well as a significant effect of predicate type (p < 0.001): speech act predicates and doxastic factives were rated higher than the doxastic non-factives and the emotive factives (in line with corpus results from Danish cited in Jensen & Christensen 2013). However, there was neither a main effect of Main Point status (p = 0.88), nor was there an interaction with Main Point status (p > 0.75), contrary to an account where V2 is driven by the asserted status of the embedded proposition.

These results are problematic for the view that MCP and EV2 are driven by the Main Point status of the embedded proposition. Rather, their results seem more in line with a lexical licensing account, whereby the acceptability of EV2 is driven purely by the type of embedding predicate, such as that advanced by Wiklund et al. (2009). Here, EV2 is licensed only by certain predicates, and is not associated with a particular discourse status. Although this account appears to correctly capture the pattern of data seen above, this type of account leaves open the question of exactly what distinguishes the cases where V2 does occur and when it does not. That is, if we adopt this view, we seem to be forced to adopt the view that EV2 is truly optional.

Finally, recall the first component of assertion, given in (13a); that the speaker is committed to p. We noted above that the Common Ground component of assertion, in (13b), is problematic given factive predicates. A number of authors, however, have argued that what is relevant for the licensing of EV2 is in fact only the criterion in (13a). Truckenbrodt (2006), building on Wechsler (1991), argues in the context of German V2 that EV2 is possible as long as someone in the context (either the speaker or the matrix clause subject) believes that p is true.¹⁰ (See also Wiklund 2010; Julien 2015; Woods 2016a; b for different versions of this general perspective.) Evidence against such a view, however, comes from Gärtner & Michaelis (2010), looking at German V2. They observe that although in a sentence involving matrix clause disjunction, the speaker is committed to neither of the disjuncts, V2 is nevertheless well-formed (and in fact obligatory!) in such sentences:

The same is also true in Swedish:

Gärtner & Michaelis (2010) present a view according to which V2 involves a weaker notion of assertion than that given in (13); rather than operating at the level of speech acts, they take the relevant notion of context update to be one which operates only at the propositional level. Their analysis of a sentence like (24) is given in (26):

Noting however, that their account nevertheless over-generates, in the case of matrix negation and conditionals, neither of which allow V2, they add a so called “progressivity requirement on assertive update”:

Progressive update (Gärtner & Michaelis 2010: 9)

“An assertive update CG’ of a common ground CG by an utterance u_d containing meaning components ▶ϕ₁ … ▶ϕ_n is progressive if CG’ ⊆ eq [CG ∩ (ϕ₁ ∪ … ∪ ϕ_n)].”

They further state that “Progressive update captures the intuition that (dependent) root phenomena in general, and V2-declaratives in particular, come with an informativity requirement related to providing “new information”” (Gärtner & Michaelis 2010: 10).

In this section, we discussed different accounts of the type of interpretative effects associated with EV2 (and MCP more broadly). We noted that previously reported (experimental and judgment) data on Swedish EV2 only appears to be compatible with an account, such as that in Wiklund et al. (2009), whereby EV2 is licensed, but not obligatory, under certain predicate classes ((1), (2)). However, we noted that these judgments about EV2 (and MCP more generally) are subtle and appear to vary across speakers, both in terms of the acceptability of EV2 and any proposed associated semantic-pragmatic correlates. Given the current state of the literature, it is possible that there are other factors beyond the type of embedding predicate—either grammatical, contextual, or processing-based—that may influence the use and distribution of the two variants. The remainder of this paper sets to tease such potential factors apart.

Section 2.1 details the methodology for extracting corpus data. Section 2.2 is devoted to testing various processing-based hypotheses, and Section 3 to testing the predictions made by the two types of lexical licensing accounts discussed above. We show that the actual patterns of usage are not compatible with either of these accounts. Neither are they compatible with a processing or usage-based account of EV2. From considering the types of embedded environments in which V2 is licensed, we arrive at a pragmatic licensing account, whereby EV2 is licensed by discourse novelty. This view then, ends up being entirely compatible with that proposed by Gärtner & Michaelis (2010), developed to account for the distribution of main clause V2 in German.¹¹ The following section details the methods of the corpus study.

2.2 Lexical information and variation

At a descriptive level, Table 1 provides a summary of EV2 by corpus. We find that overall rates of EV2 are graded by formality, with more colloquial Swedish such as blog and forum text exhibiting higher rates than formal writing. This is consistent with Heycock & Wallenberg (2013) who find comparable rates in blogs and spoken caregiver data compared with novels. This potentially reflects a sociolinguistic property of a prescription against EV2. It is striking, though, that EV2 appears stable diachronically, without a significant change between historical newspaper texts dating back to the 1860’s and modern online forums.¹⁶ This stability suggests that synchronic proportions of use do not represent a case of language change in progress, but rather a fact about the interaction of grammatical representation and use in context. The majority of our subsequent analyses were conducted primarily on the Flashback-politik subset of our data. This was done since it relates more closely to spoken dialogue compared with some of the other written material.

If we examine the attested likelihood of EV2 order by matrix predicate, we notice a fairly large degree of variation (Table 2). While the overall rate of EV2 varies by genre (see Table 1), there is general cross-corpus consistency in the relative rates of EV2 for individual verbs. This raises an important question of how to understand language usage data: Should we take any observed rate of use to be definitional? In other words, is the fact that glömma (‘forget’) introduces EV2 at four times the rate of tro (‘believe’) acquired from direct input by learners and subsequently recapitulated for the next generation? Or do rates of EV2 emerge in some other capacity? More generally, what can we learn by different ways of modeling usage data?

Previous accounts of similar data (Bresnan et al. 2007) have attempted to demonstrate that usage patterns are predictable, and thus worth studying on top of traditional grammatically judgment data. Yet, we should note that a statistical model which predicts linguistic output with high accuracy is not, in and of itself, an explanatory theory. It is insufficient to model the outcome of syntactic optionality unless we can move towards understanding why correlated variables have predictive power. Statistical tools can only verify, but not produce, empirical hypotheses.

We start from the premise that usage statistics need not be the thorn in the side of generative syntactic and semantic theory, but rather an informative window onto the underlying representations; thus flipping an argument typically taken by usage-based linguists (see Du Bois 1985; Hopper 1987; Bybee 2006, a.o.). Rather than advance the claim that “discourse use shapes grammar” (under which rates of use serve as a direct proxy for grammatical representation), the EV2 alternation presents a case study in how grammatical factors can influence rates of use in discourse instead of the inverse. In particular, we are able to evaluate specific grammatical hypotheses quantitatively.

2.3 Usage-based and processing accounts

Under a usage-based framework, grammar is taken to be simply the cognitive organization of one’s experience with language. As such, factors like frequency of use of particular constructions would be predicted to have an impact on their representation. Bybee (2006: 714) summarizes the usage-based view as follows: “[Grammar] does not have structure a priori, but rather the apparent structure emerges from the repetition of many local events.” This family of accounts is tightly linked to explanations of optionality and usage rates at the psycholinguistic level. Under this psycholinguistic view, “not only do the syntactic privileges of the to-be-produced lemmas affect syntactic structure, but so too can the timing of lemma selection have important effects on the syntactic structure of a sentence.” (Ferreira & Dell 2000: 299). The intuition can be captured by imagining that a speaker wants to recount story of the outcome of the race between the tortoise and the hare in Aesop’s famous fable using a verb like defeat. In principle, this could be encoded through either can active or passive structure. If the word hare is significantly faster to activate from memory than tortoise then it would be more efficient for the speaker to output that constituent first using the passive (the hare was defeated by the tortoise) compared with the active (the tortoise defeated the hare). Otherwise the already-retrieved hare would need to sit around in a buffer waiting to be output until the rest of the sentence had been uttered.

This psycholinguistic account has been applied to similar cases of “syntactic optionality” such as that-omission¹⁷ (Ferreira & Dell 2000), and makes straightforward predictions with respect to EV2 in Swedish: there is a “race” between outputting the adverb (in this case negation) and the embedded predicate. If the embedded predicate is activated first then it is output before the adverb (EV2 order) whereas if negation is activated first then it is output before the predicate (V-in situ order). On this theory, any factors which correlate with faster word activation will also be proxies for the corresponding output order. Such factors are well-studied empirically and include frequency (Ferreira & Dell 2000; Bock & Levelt 2002) and predictability of syntactic structure (Jaeger 2010; Hale 2014; Caplan 2018).¹⁸

In light of this, it is worth evaluating the fit of the same factors in the case of EV2. A processing or usage-based account should predict a connection between the frequency with which matrix predicates introduce embedded clauses (since it should speed up access of subsequent required embedded structure) and rates of EV2. However, as is clear in Figure 1, there is no relationship between the probability of a verb introducing an embedded clause and the probability of EV2.

Figure 1

Probability of EV2 (X-axis) against the probability of introducing an embedded clause for each matrix predicate. This is limited to verbs which have a minimum frequency of 1000, introduce an EV2 clause at least 5 times, and which have occurred in a diagnostic sentence at least 100 times in the Flashback-politik corpus. There is no significant correlation between embedded clause-taking and the likelihood of EV2 order.

This is confirmed by a linear regression model in which probability of EV2 (conditioned on matrix verb) is the dependent measure and probability of embedded clause (conditioned on same matrix verb) is the independent measure (Table 3). A similar prediction might be made within the embedded clauses themselves—there might be some connection between the frequency of a verb appearing in an embedded clause and EV2. This prediction is not borne out; there is no significant correlation between the frequency with which a verb appears in an embedded clause and the rate at which it occurs in an EV2-clause (Table 3). Nor is there any correlation between the total frequency of a verb and the rate at which it occurs in an EV2-clause. Analyses are stable across corpora, but results below are reported only from the Flashback-politik corpus.

It is still conceivable that an underlying relation is hidden by the fact that the majority of lemmas are never attested with EV2. However, this is not the case; these analyses are robust even if limited only to verbs attested as taking EV2 order at least five times (Table 4).

Another possibility is that rates of EV2 are a psycholinguistic by-product of speakers “forgetting” that they’re in an embedded clause, something akin to a speech error or disfluency. It is impossible to directly quantify the degree of disfluency based on text alone, but we can take an estimatable proxy. If a large amount of syntactic material or information content intervenes between the matrix verb and the beginning of the embedded clause, the processing system might be more likely to reset to applying main-clause syntax. If this were the case, we would predict an increase in intervening material before the complementizer to correlate with increased rates of EV2. In practice however, there is no clear relation between intervening material and EV2 (Figure 2).

Figure 2

Length of material (number of words) intervening between the matrix predicate and the complementizer (X-axis) against the rate of EV2 (Y-axis). There is no overall effect of intervening material on rates of EV2, contra the predictions of a sentence production account. Data from the Flashback-Politik corpus.

What should be made of this lack of processing-level effects on EV2? The fact that we do not find evidence for a connection between frequency or predictability factors and rates of EV2 order are less a failure to replicate past work (Ferreira & Dell 2000; Bresnan et al. 2007), and more an identification that whatever components drive the realization of EV2 vs. in-situ order are grammatical factors, rather than psychological-production ones. Probabilistic effects are not a homogeneous set and not all “optionality” represents the same kind of phenomenon. While a term like “optional” may imply free and unconditioned variation, research on this topic has found underlying conditioning factors to range from sociolinguistic (Elsness 1984), to morpho-syntactic (Jeoung 2018), to psycholinguistic (Ferreira & Dell 2000). See Tamminga et al. (2016) for an overview of such contrasts. Simply because a sample of language use is probabilistic in nature does not necessarily mean that the underlying linguistic representation is itself probabilistic, contra the usage-based view that rates of particular lexical co-occurrence is also part of the underlying representation (Bybee & Eddington 2006).

We argue that the consistent by-predicate rates of EV2 do not require speakers to be implicitly sensitive to such probabilities, but rather these stable rates of variation emerge as an interaction between meaning and context. A speaker doesn’t need an internal counter to tell them to utter a particular syntactic variant (EV2 vs. V-in situ) with say twice as often as with deny. Rather, the relative rates of EV2 across predicates arise in the interaction between lexical properties of the matrix predicate, the discourse function associated with EV2, and elements of the discourse context. In the following sections, we evaluate several theories about the discourse function of EV2, and the types of lexical properties that are relevant to the licensing of EV2.

3.1 Factivity

On the type of account articulated in De Cuba & Ürögdi (2009); Haegeman & Ürögdi (2010); Haegeman (2014); Kastner (2015), among others, factive verbs are predicted to categorically disallow EV2, as a type of Main Clause Phenomena (see discussion in Section 1.4). We noted that this line of analysis is at odds with the observation made by Hooper & Thompson (1973) and subsequent work, that the doxastic factives allow MCP and V2 complements. Nevertheless, given that judgments in this area appear to be subtle and prone to variability, we wanted to test the empirical claim that factive and non-factive predicates differ fundamentally in their ability to license MCP in the context of EV2, against the large scale data available in the BRF-corpora. If these views were correct, we would expect significantly lower rates of EV2 under factive than under non-factive verbs.

However, as shown in Figure 3, we find that factivity does not influence the rates of EV2. In fact, from this plot, it looks as though factive verbs (the gold bar) show slightly higher rates of EV2 than the non-factive verbs (the gray bar); however, this difference is not statistically significant.

Figure 3

Rates of V2 under factive vs. non-factive verbs; plot based on data from the Flashback-Politik corpus (2,841,872 sentences).

We also ran a Wilcoxon Rank Sum test (a non-parametric alternative to the two-sample t-test), which allowed us to reject the hypothesis that the distribution of EV2 sentences is different for factive as opposed to non-factive verbs (W = 748, p = 0.6949). This was true for all corpora that we investigated.

3.2 (Optional) lexical licensing

On the view advanced by Wiklund et al. (2009), discussed in Section 1.4, EV2 is optional in the complements of certain predicate types, namely those in (1): speech act predicates, doxastic non-factives, and doxastic factives; but not in the complements of the predicate classes in (2): emotive factives and response predicates.

In terms of the distribution of EV2 in the corpus, this account predicts that the relevant factor determining the rates of EV2 is simply membership of a particular lexical class. Moreover, given that pragmatic factors play no explanatory role on this account, we expect that if it were correct, then the rates of EV2 across predicate classes should be essentially constant, both across different discourse types—represented by the different genres of the corpora (see Table 1), as well as across the different predicates within a given predicate class.

Contrary to the first of these two predictions, we find that, while the distribution of EV2 to some extent varies across predicate classes along the lines predicted by this account (overall higher rates of V2 in the complements of speech act predicates, doxastic non-factives, and doxastic factives), the rates of EV2 across predicate classes varied substantially across different corpora, as shown in Figure 4.

Figure 4

Rates of EV2 from three of the BRF-corpora. From top to bottom: Familjeliv-känsliga (family-oriented discussion forum; 5,971,907 sentences), Flashback-Politik (online forum for political discussion; 2,841,872 sentences), and Rd-bet (government texts; 372,054 sentences).

It is also worth noting that in neither corpus do the rates of EV2 straightforwardly track the rates of EV2 found in Jensen & Christensen’s (2013) Danish corpus, which were also reflected in the judgment data from Djärv, Heycock & Rohde (2017), where the speech act and doxastic factives showed the highest rates/judgments of acceptability for EV2, followed by the doxastic non-factives and the emotive factives.

Moreover, contrary to the second prediction made by this account, we also found that there was significant variability within the different verb classes: Figure 5 shows the variable rates of EV2 for the 21 speech act predicates in our data set. Note that similar variation was found across the other verb classes as well.

Figure 5

Probability of EV2 by lemma within the class of speech act verbs (the x-axis represents the 21 different verbs in this class ordered by proportion of EV2); plot based on data from a corpus of text from a political online forum (Flashback-Politik; 2,841,872 sentences).

We take this as evidence against this type of strong lexical licensing account, whereby membership of a given lexical class is what determines whether EV2 is available or not.

In Sections 3.1 and 3.2, we tested the predictions made by the two types of “selection-based accounts” discussed in Section 1.4 against large-scale data from the BRF corpus: one according to which V2 should not be available in the complements of factive verbs; and one whereby V2 is available, but entirely optional, in the complements of certain predicate types (1), but not others (2). We found that for neither of the two accounts were their predictions straightforwardly borne out. Rather, the distribution illustrated in Figure 4 suggests to us that, in addition to the lexical semantics of the embedding predicate, discourse factors play a significant role in driving the distribution of EV2, given that the different corpora can be understood to represent different discourse types. In particular, the distribution we observe looks like what we would expect if it were the case that EV2-clauses are associated with some kind of pragmatic meaning; the use of which is influenced by (but not solely determined by) the meaning of the embedding predicate, along with the type of discourse context in which the sentence is uttered. In the following section, we suggest that this pragmatic meaning is whether or not the embedded proposition p is discourse-new (Section 4). Subsequently we present further experimental (Section 5) and corpus (Section 6) results supporting this hypothesis.

5.2 Results

Figures 7–8 show the responses for the critical items and the two control conditions (34) (the responses for the conditional fillers (35) are not included).

Figure 7

Response patterns by predicate type and polarity (critical and control conditions). The blue horizontal line shows the overall mean.

Figure 8

Response patterns by predicate and polarity (critical and control conditions). The blue horizontal line shows the overall mean

The R squared values for the data with and without the outliers are given in Table 5. As expected, we find that with the subsetted data (without the outliers) the model fits the data better than with the full data set. This is true both for the models based on predicate type and verb lemma. We also observe that for none of the models is there a big difference between the conditional and the marginal R squared values, showing us that most of the variation in the data is explained by the fixed effects.

The linear mixed effects model (based on predicate type, without outliers, n = 51) shows a main effect of predicate type. Relative to the intercept (6.0920; this is the mean of the dependent variable for the two base levels: predicate type = Speech Act and polarity = positive), the model shows that the following conditions are significantly different (p < 0.001) (the numbers represent the model estimated difference relative to the base levels): Doxastic Non-factive (β = –1.7744); Response (β = –4.1227), Emotive Factive (β = –3.5806), old information controls (β = –5.0297), and polarity (β = –4.0726, p < 0.001). The new information controls did not differ significantly from the base levels (β = 0.1532, p = 0.361).

The model shows the following significant interactions (p < 0.001): the difference between the positive and the negative polarity is greater for the Speech Act predicates than for the other predicate types; Doxastic Non-factives (β = 2.0267), Response (β = 3.9924), and Emotive Factives (β = 4.3679). Given the fixed effect of polarity we just observed (β = –4.0726, p < 0.001), this means that the difference between the two polarity conditions for the Doxastic Non-factives is about half the size of that for the Speech Act predicates, whereas for the Response predicates and Emotive factives, there is essentially no difference between the two polarities: in these conditions, the effect of negation is close to zero. In fact, the Emotive Factives appear to show a small difference in the opposite direction from the other conditions.

These results then are precisely what we predicted (Section 5.1.4). Additionally, the difference between the Speech Act and Non-factive Doxastic predicates is in line with the observation that the Speech Act predicates show the overall highest levels of EV2. By testing acceptability judgements via English translations rather than the original Swedish we have ensured that any lexically-specific behavior of individual English predictes is precisely limited to English. Since the only connection between the English test items and their Swedish counterparts is through their formal semantic properties, we can rest assured that the strong connection we see between discourse-novelty (tested in English) and rates of EV2 (evaluated in Swedish) is robust. We know from this that the connection is due to structural causality rather than something psycholinguistic in nature like learned co-variation.