Icelandic declarative V1 : a brief overview

This squib is a brief state of the art overview of declarative V1 in Icelandic, old and modern. Three(relevant) types of such clauses are discussed: Narrative Inversion, with an overt topical subjectdirectly after the verb, Presentational V1, with an overt non-topical subject, and Null-subject V1.Narrative Inversion is a robust main clause phenomenon, whereas Presentational V1 and Null-subjectV1 are found in subordinate clauses, albeit less frequently than in main clauses. Therestrictions on declarative V1 have remained largely stable throughout the history of Icelandic. Allthree types are continuity/linking orders, hence typical of narrative and other cohesive texts, but veryrare, almost nonexistent, in common discourse types in spoken language. Overall, declarative V1 ismore characteristic of and common in Old Icelandic texts than in Modern Icelandic texts, presumablyas the bulk of the preserved Old Icelandic texts are narrative texts, while such texts are only afraction of accessible Modern Icelandic texts

Subject Float, Low Subject Trapping, and Case in Icelandic

This article describes and discusses two peculiar sets of (in)defi nitenessfacts applying to subjects in Icelandic, here referred to as Subject Floatand Low Subject Trapping. Indefi nite subjects (commonly quantifi ed) inpresentational sentences and related clause types may either occupy thecomplement position within the predicate phrase or “fl oat” into variouspositions in the middle fi eld. This is Subject Float, yielding variation suchas “There would (many farmers) then (many farmers) probably (manyfarmers) be (?*many farmers) elected (many farmers)”. Conversely, andunexpectedly, defi nite NP subjects of some adjectival and verbal predicatesmust stay in the complement position. This is Low Subject Trapping,yielding orders such as “there is cold radiator-the” and “there cooledradiator-the”. It is shown that the licensing of subject NPs in the variouspositions in Subject Float and in the complement position in Low SubjectTrapping is unrelated to specifi c grammatical cases, thus refuting the widelyadopted case approach to NP licensing. Although Icelandic case markinghas been widely discussed, Subject Float and Low Subject Trapping havenot previously received a detailed scrutiny; these phenomena provideadditional and partly new knockout arguments against the case approach toNP licensing and NP movement. While high NP raising to subject (Spec,IP)is unaffected by case, it seems to involve both Person and Topic matching

Gender at the edge

This article develops an analysis of Gender whereby D-gender entersgrammar as a feature variable (edge linker), without a fixed value,either probing n or scanning the context for a value. Only the latterstrategy is available in pronominal gender languages such as English,as they lack n-gender, whereas both strategies are applicable in ngenderlanguages, variably so for variable DPs, depending on their nPcontent and on context. The article adopts the idea that context linkingdoes not merely involve pragmatic context scanning but also has asyntactic side to it, edge computation, whereby context-scanned andrecycled features are computed at the phase edge in relation to CPinternalelements, via edge linkers. The context-linking approach hasbeen previously launched for Tense and Person. This article extendsit to Gender, thereby generalizing over context-sensitive grammaticalcategories and developing a novel view of the overall architecture ofgrammar

Topicality in Icelandic : Null arguments and Narrative Inversion

This paper discusses topicality in Icelandic grammar as realized in several phenomena: referential third person pro drop in Old Icelandic, diverse types of topic drop in Old and Modern Icelandic, and Narrative Inversion (declarative VS clauses), also in both Old and Modern Icelandic. These phenomena all involve aboutness topics, given topics or both, thus showing that distinct types of topicality are active in Icelandic. However, in contrast to Italian, Icelandic does not provide evidence that different topic types have different structural correlates, a fact that suggests that topicality types are not generally structuralized in language (while not excluding that a topicality hierarchy may be PF-licensed by externalization properties specific to languages like Italian). Topicality is presumably a universally available category or phenomenon, but it is plausibly an interface third factor phenomenon (in the sense of Chomsky 2005), not provided by Universal Grammar but interacting with it in the shaping of externalized grammar, differently so in different languages

Swedish predicative oblique case : default or not?

This article describes and discusses an ongoing change of case marking, NOM(inative) > OBL(ique), in certain predicates in Swedish (type “Then you can be I” > “Then you can be me”). This change has gone largely unnoticed hitherto. The discussion is based on a large-scale online survey, conducted in May 2016. It was tested whether the change relates to finiteness or to semantics. The results strongly indicate that the latter is the case. The change is found in predicates that express role semantics but nondetectable in predicates with plain identity readings (type “It is I”). In addition, there are strong indications that the change is closely related to another change that is also taking place in Swedish, NOM > OBL in comparative phrases (type “She is bigger than I” > “She is bigger than me”). The results speak against the hypothesis that OBL is becoming default in Swedish. Instead, it seems that many speakers are reanalyzing role predicates as well as comparative phrases such that they contain a head that is a case assigner, an overt one in comparatives but a silent one in role predicates. The article concludes that Swedish is largely retaining its basic NOM-OBL case system

Presentational sentences in Icelandic and Swedish : Roles and positions

In this article we report on a systematic comparison of presentational sentencesin Icelandic and Swedish, looking in particular at possible thematicroles of the pivot and how they correlate with positional options. Despitesome well-known differences between the languages (only Icelandic allows‘high’ IP-pivots and pivots with transitive verbs), it turns out that the restrictionson VP-pivots are similar, both in terms of roles and positions.VP-pivots have to be Themes and may co-occur with other DPs, but onlyif the pivot is the last DP argument. We show how these restrictions to someextent reflect the argument structure proposed in Platzack (2010). In additionwe show that we need to distinguish presentational sentences among thedifferent Transitive Expletive Constructions discussed in Håkansson (2017)