On Prosody and Focus in Object Shift

Recent work on object shift in the Scandinavian languages has rejected earlier syntactic analyses in favor of prosodic or information-structural accounts. In this paper I present new evidence from Danish copular clauses that argues against a prosodic analysis of the phenomenon. In particular, I show that speci cational copular clauses do not allow object shift and that this fact cannot be accounted for in prosodic terms. I propose that the observed lack of object shift is due to the xed information structure of speci cational clauses: the object is invariably focused and that is what prevents it from shifting. This account dovetails with the focus-based analysis of object shift proposed by Holmberg (1999), and is also compatible with the syntactic analysis developed in Sells (2001).