Adverbiella infinitivfraser i svenskans historia

The aim of this article is to give an account of prepositional adverbial infinitives in the history of Swedish. Present Day Swedish shows a range of such adverbial infinitives, including purposive, abessive, substitutive, temporal, and instrumental infinitives. With the exception of purposive infinitives, such adverbial infinitives are not attested in Old Swedish (1225–1526). The earliest examples of other adverbial infinitives are abessive and substitutive, from the second half of the 17th century. Temporal infinitives are first attested in the late 18th century and instrumental infinitives in the first half of the 19th century. This order of appearance is strikingly similar to the order in which adverbial infinitives emerge in Romance (cf. Schulte 2007a). One way to understand this is that the spread of adverbial infinitives in Swedish follows a general, cross-linguistic pattern of the evolution of adverbial categories. In an attempt to understand how these adverbial notions were expressed before the adverbial infinitives are attested, I also conduct a contrastive study of Övdalian translations of Swedish texts. The results show that an adverbial infinitive in Swedish is often translated with another construction in Övdalian. It is possible that the same linguistic resources were used in earlier stages of Swedish