"Too little is being built."
Translation:Det byggs för lite.
19 CommentsThis discussion is locked.
This is one of those fun ones where how it gets constructed in Swedish and how the sentence with the same meaning is constructed in English are fairly different. I don't suppose anyone has any tips for how to remember "it is built too little" means "too little is being built," apart from just "think more Swedish"?
:-P
The main reason we do this is word order. We absolutely want to have the verb in second place. But we also care a lot about information structure, so putting too little at the start doesn't seem like a great option. It's more helpful for the listener to get the general thing I'm talking about first (building) and my comment about (there's too little of it going on) it second. (This is sometimes called 'topic' and 'comment' in linguistics).
Since the V2 rule makes our sentence structure a bit inflexible, it's very useful for us to have this placeholder pronoun det that helps us move things around in the sentence anyway.
In more casual language, another natural way of saying this in Swedish would be De bygger för lite and in English 'They build too little' – where you'd also get the same comfortable information structure.