The development of Swedish particle placement

This paper is concerned with the word order of particle constructions in the history of Swedish. Unlike the other Germanic languages, present-day Swedish only allows the order particle–object. In older Swedish, both of the orders  particle–object and object–particle were possible, as in e.g. present-day Norwegian. We trace the development of the present-day Swedish word order in texts from the 15th to the 19th century. Furthermore, we show that the  development is not tied to changes in pronominal object shift, and suggest that the present-day word order is a consequence of a reanalysis of the particle from phrasal modifier to head (cf. the Head Preference Principle proposed by van Gelderen 2004).