It has been noted that examples with extractions out of relative clauses that have been attested in Danish, Norwegian and Swedish are judged to be unacceptable in Icelandic and Faroese. We hypothesize that this may reflect whether or not speakers tend to prepose unstressed object pronouns as a way of establishing a coherent discourse. In this article we investigate to what extent pronoun preposing is used in Swedish, Icelandic and Faroese and whether there is any correlation with the acceptabilty of extractions from relative clauses. We show that Icelandic speakers use pronoun preposing to a very limited extent whereas Faroese speakers often prepose the VP or sentential anaphor tao. In both languages extraction from relative clauses is mainly judged to be unacceptable, with Faroese speakers being somewhat more accepting of extraction from presentational relatives. A crucial factor seems to be whether preposing is associated with a marked, contrastive interpretation or not.
Part of this research was supported by an International Postdoc grant (Dnr. 2017-06139) from the Swedish Research Council, awarded to F.L.