Old Icelandic

Rögnvaldsson, Eiríkur

doi:10.1075/nowele.26.01rog

Cited by 31 publications

(11 citation statements)

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“…There has been some debate about configurationality in relation to Old Norse, with Faarlund (1990) arguing that Old Norse was a nonconfigurational language and Braunmüller (1994) making the case for Old Norse noun phrases being nonconfigurational. By contrast, Platzack (1991), Stockwell and King (1993), and Rögnvaldsson (1995) all argue against the conclusions drawn by Faarlund (1990). However, they do so on the basis of a broader notion of nonconfigurationality than order and constituency alone.…”

Section: 5contrasting

confidence: 43%

Growing syntax: The development of a DP in North Germanic

Börjars¹,

Harries²,

Vincent³

2016

lan

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Grammaticalization as standardly conceived is a change whereby an item develops from a lexical to a grammatical or functional meaning, or from being less to more grammatical. In this article we show that this can only be part of the story; for a full account we need to understand the syntactic structures into which grammaticalizing elements fit and how they too develop. To achieve this end we consider in detail the history of definiteness marking within the noun phrase in North Germanic, and in particular in Faroese. We show how this change requires us to distinguish between projecting and nonprojecting categories, and how a category can emerge over time and only subsequently develop into a head with its own associated functional projection. The necessary structure, rather than being intrinsic to an aprioristic universal grammar, grows over time as part of the grammaticalization process. We suggest that this in turn argues for a parallel correspondence theory of grammar such as the one adopted here, lexical-functional grammar, in which different dimensions of linguistic structure can change at different rates.*

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Section: 5contrasting

confidence: 43%

Growing syntax: The development of a DP in North Germanic

Börjars¹,

Harries²,

Vincent³

2016

lan

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“…On the one hand, it has been argued that the oblique subject-like NPs were in fact syntactic subjects already in Old Germanic (Allen 1986von Seefranz-Montag 1983, 1984 for Old English andOld High German ;Bernó dusson 1982 ;Rö gnvaldsson 1991Rö gnvaldsson , 1995Rö gnvaldsson , 1996aMaling 1998and Haugan 1998and Barðdal 1997and Barðdal , 1998and Barðdal , 2000a for Old Scandinavian/ Germanic in general). This is a legitimate alternative to the 'standard Old Icelandic orthography', which is based on a normalising convention by 19th-century philologists and does not always accurately reflect the spelling in the manuscripts.…”

Section: O D E R N I C E L a N D I C An Intriguing Property Of Modementioning

confidence: 99%

The change that never happened: the story of oblique subjects

Barðdal

Eythórsson

2003

J. Ling.

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This paper contributes to an ongoing debate on the syntactic status of oblique subject-like NPs in the ‘impersonal’ construction (of the type me-thinks) in Old Germanic. The debate is caused by the lack of canonical subject case marking in such NPs. It has been argued that these NPs are syntactic objects, but we provide evidence for their subject status, as in Modern Icelandic and Faroese. Thus, we argue that the syntactic status of the oblique subject-like NPs has not changed at all from object status to subject status, contra standard claims in the literature. Our evidence stems from Old Icelandic, but the analysis has implications for the other old Germanic languages as well. However, a change from non-canonical to canonical subject case marking (‘Nominative Sickness’) has affected all the Germanic languages to a varying degree.

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“…Therefore, examples like (3a-b) clearly show that subject-like datives behave as ordinary nominative subjects in that they can and must be missing in control infinitives, and the example in (4) shows that objects do not share this property. Similar examples of subject-like obliques being left unexpressed in control constructions have been documented in Old Norse-Icelandic (Rögnvaldsson 1995, Barðdal & Eythórsson 2003a, Old Swedish (Barðdal & Eythórsson 2003a, cf. Falk 1997), Early Middle English (SeefranzMontag 1983, Allen 1995, and most recently in Old French.…”

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confidence: 75%