Expletive passives in Scandinavian -- with and without objects

\citet{Holmberg2002} proposes an account for the variation concerning expletives, participial agreement and word order in periphrastic passives in the Mainland Scandinavian languages in terms of parameters. In this short article, the predictions of Holmberg’s proposal are evaluated against a corpus study of expletive passives. It turns out that only Norwegian 1 (\textit{bokmål}) behaves as expected given Holmberg’s parameter settings; it lacks participle agreement and only displays the PCP DO word order, with few exceptions. Danish, which has the same parameter settings as Norwegian 1, is shown to have had the DO PCP order in earlier stages and this order is still used in many dialects. Norwegian 2 (\textit{nynorsk}) and Swedish are predicted to allow both the PCP DO order and the DO PCP order, but it is shown that Norwegian 2 uses the same order as Norwegian 1, PCP DO, whereas Swedish – to the limited extent that the periphrastic passive is actually used in expletive passives – uses the DO PCP order. In both Danish and Swedish, the DO PCP order is facilitated by an incorporated negation in the DO, just as in active clauses, a fact that should presumably be reflected in the analysis.