“It is me” – the replacement of the nominative by the oblique form in Danish subject complements

Abstract

Abstract In this paper, it is suggested that the replacement of the nominative by the oblique form in Danish subject complements happened as a part of major structural changes taking place in Middle Danish. The major structural changes in question involve the shift from a case-rich to a case-poor language in Early Middle Danish/Late Middle Danish, and the changing of the status of the subject of the sentence in Late Middle Danish/Early Modern Danish. As one outcome, the distribution of the case forms of personal pronouns changed from being primarily following the traditional syntactic-semantic principle of conveying semantic roles and syntactic functions to following principles pertaining to information structure with notions like theme and rheme, prominence and focus/anti-focus. The approach is functional-structural.