Answer to word order/grammatical question raised in group 3, meeting 7

by **Vanja** Tue Apr 21, 2015 9:29 am

Last week in group 3, we had a word order/grammatical question regarding one of the sentences in the dialogues, and here is the answer:

Sentence in question:
"Och så vill jag även gärna ha en stor popcorn och två mellan-Fanta." (dialogue 10, Buying tickets and popcorn at the movies)

The question was:
Why can't we say "Och så jag vill gärna ha..." instead of "Och så vill jag gärna ha..."?

The answer:
The reason why it is wrong to say "Och så jag vill gärna ha..:" is because we have V2 word order in Swedish, which means that the verb must always be in second place. It is rather unusual, and quite specific for Swedish, and almost all learners have trouble with this, and it sticks even up to rather advanced levels.

Now, in this case the sentence starts with a conjunction ("Och"), but conjunctions and subjunctions do not count in the word order. In second place we have the adverb "så", which in essence becomes the first word in the order, and therefor the verb ("vill") has to come immediately after it.

Compare if the sentence wouldn't have had the adverb "så". In that case it would have read "Och jag vill gärna ha...", i.e. "Jag" in first place (because the conjunction "och" doesn't count) and the verb "vill" in second place.

Like with everything else concerning the Swedish language, there is an exception:
Question sentences always start with the verb, unless they start with a question word. I.e. "Är du klar?" (Are you ready?), "Ska vi gå?" (Shall we go?), "Kan du simma?" (Can you swim?) etc., or questions with question words, such as "hur" (how), "vem" (who), "vad" (what).

I hope this answers the question, but if anything is unclear, please leave a comment below and I will reply as soon as I can.

Kind regards,
Vanja