This article examines passive-type constructions in Mauritian Creole, arguing that they are topic, not passive constructions. I claim that their initial argument (the displaced object) occupies the specifier position of a Topic Phrase, not the structural subject position. This proposal is motivated by the fact that nothing at the surface identifies the displaced object as a grammatical subject, except its position relative to an auxiliary or verb. The topic analysis is supported by both semantic restrictions relating to specificity and animacy and syntactic restrictions relating to distribution (word order) and coordination. It is also supported by the fact that these same restrictions do not apply in unaccusatives, a structurally similar type of construction. The important contribution of this article is that passive-type constructions in Mauritian Creole are ‘apparent’ rather ‘real’ passives, with the wider implication being that creoles, like many languages, do not use canonical passives to express passive meaning.

Alternating Dat-Nom/Nom-Dat verbs in Icelandic are notorious for instantiating two diametrically opposed argument structures: the Dat-Nom and the Nom-Dat construction. We conduct a systematic study of the relevant verbs to uncover the factors steering the alternation. This involves a comparison of 15 verbs, five alternating ones, and as a control, five Nom-Dat verbs and five non-alternating Dat-Nom verbs. Our findings show that alternating verbs instantiate the Nom-Dat construction 54% of the time and the Dat-Nom construction 46% of the time on average for four of five verbs when both arguments are full NPs. However, in configurations with a nominative pronoun, the Nom-Dat construction takes precedence over the Dat-Nom construction. Also, for the double-NP configuration, a logistic regression analysis identifies indefiniteness and length as two key predictors, apart from nominative case marking. We demonstrate that the latter systematically correlates with discourse-prominence, which we show, upon closer inspection, correlates with topicality.

This article deals with two syntactic differences between Present-Day Swedish (PDSw) and Early Modern Swedish (EMSw): first, only EMSw allows VS and XVS word order to occur in relative clauses; second, only EMSw permits non-verb-initial imperatives. One structural difference between the varieties is assumed to be a prerequisite for all these word order differences: the subject position was spec-TP in EMSw but is spec-FinP in PDSw. Only the lower position (spec-TP) is compatible with inversion (VS) and fronting of non-subjects (XVS) in relative clauses as well as with imperative clauses having elements other than the imperative verb in the initial position. To be able to account for the latter phenomenon, however, an additional assumption is needed: the imperative type-feature, [imp], always accompanies the verb in PDSw but is tied to an operator in EMSw. The first assumption about differing subject positions is independently motivated by findings already in the previous literature. The second assumption about the differing behaviour of [imp] in the two varieties is supported by the distribution of imperative verbs over a wider range of syntactic contexts in EMSw than in PDSw.