Contrary to previous claims, weather verbs in Icelandic are not “no-argument” predicates. Both in Old and Modern Icelandic they can appear with an NP either in nominative, accusative or dative case. It can be shown that in Modern Icelandic the NPs are subjects, and this is likely to have been the case in Old Icelandic. Diachronically, in addition to some changes in subject case marking (Nominative Substitution and Impersonalization), the main innovations in weather verbs involve the introduction of the “expletive” elements það and hann. On the whole, however, there is considerable stability in the use of weather verbs in the history of Icelandic. Not only are the lexical items nearly all the same, but a clear continuity in the syntax of weather expressions can be documented.

Although Icelandic is a verb second language (V2), it sometimes allows for V3 orders. In this paper, I focus on a type of Icelandic V3 which consists of an adverbial adjunct occurring in front of wh-questions and present the results of a pilot study that investigated the effects of the length of prosodic break and clause type in relation to V3 structures. Participants were presented with an adverbial clause sandwiched between two sentences (A and B), of which the latter varied between a wh-question and a subject-initial sentence. The breaks between the adverbial and the sentences varied in length. The task was to judge which sentence (A or B) was longer, with the response reflecting which sentence the adverbial clause was parsed with. The results indicate that both the clause type of the B sentence and the length of the prosodic break between the adverbial and the B sentence had a significant effect on how the sentences were parsed.