186 (321) Älvdalen (Os) preposed (strong stress):
(a)
Eð ir onumes gard. it
is
his
farm
‘It is his farm.’ (b)
postposed (weak stress):
Gardn -os ar
buolageð
tsyöpt.
farm
company.DEF
buy.SUP
his
have.PRS
‘His farm has been bought by the company.’ In the intermediate area, pre- and post-position are equally probable with kin terms in Delsing’s material – 45 per cent of the occurrences are postposed. There is considerable variation within the area, though. The following provinces have a clear majority for the preposed alternative: Östergötland, north Småland, Bohuslän, (Halland), Närke, Dalsland. The following prefer the postposed construction: Södermanland, (Västmanland), south Värmland, Västergötland. (Provinces with too low total numbers are in parentheses.) It thus appears that much of Sweden – not only the Peripheral Swedish area – has withstood wholly or partly the trend towards preposed pronominal possessors. What is somewhat remarkable in this context is that written medieval Swedish, except for the provincial laws, went further in this trend than virtually any of the vernaculars spoken within the borders of medieval Sweden, in that preposed possessive pronouns are the norm even with kin terms. Thus, in the Källtext corpus, I found only one instance of the phrase fadher min ‘my father’ as against about 30 with the preposed pronoun. Among the vernaculars, it is only the old Danish provinces and the adjacent southern Småland where preposed pronouns are equally rare or non-existent in Delsing’s material. The contrast with the Peripheral Swedish area is of course even more striking. It seems fairly clear that with regard to the placement of possessive pronouns, the usage in written medieval Swedish has little support in the surviving vernaculars. We may speculate that it was based on a prestige dialect heavily influenced by foreign models, probably primarily Danish ones.