Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-fscjk Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-26T05:00:17.820Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Cataphora, expletives and impersonal constructions in the history of Icelandic

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 September 2019

Hannah Booth
Hannah Booth*
Affiliation:
Department of Linguistics, Ghent University, 9000 Gent, Belgium
*
Email for correspondence: hannah.booth@ugent.be
Get access

Abstract

This paper presents a diachronic account for the emergence of the expletive það in Icelandic impersonal constructions. Using data from the IcePaHC corpus (Wallenberg et al. 2011), I show that a cataphorically referential það functions as a topic position placeholder in Old Icelandic (1150-1350) in impersonals with a clausal argument. The corpus findings indicate that það spread from this early cataphoric context to impersonals which lack the clausal argument, with ‘say-type predicates’ acting as a bridging context. Strikingly, this coincides with another change whereby cataphoric það becomes increasingly restricted to the topic position in constructions with a clausal subject. I interpret this as evidence that cataphoric það is losing its subject status in such contexts and becoming a topic position placeholder, in line with its function in impersonals. This sheds light on the mixed status of cataphoric það in modern Icelandic and challenges the ‘Prefinite First Hypothesis’ for the diachrony of Germanic expletives (e.g. Faarlund 1990).

Keywords

Cataphoraexpletiveshistorical corporaIcelandicimpersonalssyntactic change
Type
Research Article
Information
Nordic Journal of Linguistics , Volume 42 , Issue 2 , October 2019 , pp. 139 - 164
Copyright
© Nordic Association of Linguistics 2019 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Andrews, Avery. 1990. Unification and morphological blocking. Natural Language & Linguistic Theory 8(4), 507–557.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Asudeh, Ash & Toivonen, Ida. 2009. Lexical-functional grammar. In Heine, Bernd & Narrog, Heiko (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Linguistic Analysis, 425–458. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Axel, Katrin. 2007. Studies on Old High German Syntax: Left Sentence Periphery, Verb Placement and Verb-Second. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bennis, Hans. 1986. Gaps and Dummies. Dordrecht: Foris publications.Google Scholar
Berman, Judith, Dipper, Stefanie, Fortmann, Christian & Kuhn, Jonas. 1998. Argument clauses and correlative es in German – deriving discourse properties in a unification analysis. In Butt, Miriam & King, Tracy Holloway (eds.), Proceedings of the LFG’98 Conference, University of Queensland, Brisbane, Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications.Google Scholar
Berman, Judith. 2003. Clausal Syntax of German. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications.Google Scholar
Booth, Hannah. 2018. Expletives and Clause Structure: Syntactic Change in Icelandic. Doctoral dissertation, University of Manchester.Google Scholar
Booth, Hannah, Schätzle, Christin, Börjars, Kersti, & Butt, Miriam. (2017). Dative subjects and the rise of positional licensing in Icelandic. In Butt, Miriam, & King, Tracy Holloway (Eds.): Proceedings of the LFG’17 Conference, University of Konstanz, 104–124. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications.Google Scholar
Breivik, Leiv Egil. 1990. Existential There: A synchronic and diachronic study. Oslo: Novus Press.Google Scholar
Bresnan, Joan & Kanerva, Jonni M.. 1989. Locative inversion in Chicheŵa: A case study of factorization in grammar. Linguistic Inquiry 20(1), 1–50.Google Scholar
Bresnan, Joan, Asudeh, Ash, Toivonen, Ida & Wechsler, Stephen. 2015. Lexical-Functional Syntax, 2nd Edition. Oxford: Blackwell.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Butt, Miriam, Bögel, Tina, Kotcheva, Kristina, Schätzle, Christin, Rohrdantz, Christian, Sacha, Dominik, Dehé, Nicole & Keim, Daniel. 2014. V1 in Icelandic: A multifactorical visualization of historical data. In Proceedings of VisLR: Visualization as added value in the development, use and evaluation of Language Resources, 33–40. Workshop at the 9th edition of the Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (LREC 2014), Reykjavik, Iceland.Google Scholar
Chomsky, Noam. 1981. Lectures on Government and Binding. Dordrecht: Foris Publications.Google Scholar
Dalrymple, Mary & Lødrup, Helge. 2000. The grammatical functions of complement clauses. In Butt, Miriam & King, Tracy Holloway (eds.), Proceedings of the LFG’00 Conference, University of California, Berkeley, 104–121. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications.Google Scholar
Eythórsson, Thórhallur. 2008. The New Passive in Icelandic really is a passive. In Eythórsson, Thórhallur (ed.), Grammatical Change and Linguistic Theory: The Rosendal papers, 173–219. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Eythórsson, Thórhallur & Sigurðardóttir, Sigríður Sæunn. 2016. A brief history of Icelandic weather verbs: syntax, semantics and argument structure. Working Papers in Scandinavian Syntax 96, 91–125.Google Scholar
Falk, Cecilia. 1993. Non-referential Subjects in the History of Swedish. Department of Scandinavian Languages, Lund University.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Faarlund, Jan Terje. 1990. Syntactic Change: Toward a Theory of Historical Syntax. Berlin: de Gruyter.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Haiman, John. 1974. Targets and Syntactic Change. The Hague: Mouton.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Håkansson, David. 2017. Transitive expletive constructions in Swedish. Nordic Journal of Linguistics 40(3), 255–285.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Heine, Bernd. 2002. On the role of context in grammaticalization. In Wischer, Ilse & Diewald, Gabriele (eds.), New Reflections on Grammaticalization, 83–101. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hróarsdóttir, Þorbjörg. 1998. Setningafræðilegar breytingar á 19. öld: þróun þriggja málbreytinga. [Syntactic changes in the 19th century: The development of three linguistic changes]. Reykjavík: Institute of Linguistics, University of Iceland.Google Scholar
Ingham, Richard. 2001. The structure and function of expletive there in pre-modern English. Reading Working Papers in Linguistics 5, 231–249.Google Scholar
Jónsson, Jóhannes Gísli. 2009. The new impersonal as a true passive. In Alexiadou, Artemis, Hankamer, Jorge, McFadden, Thomas, Nuger, Justin & Schäfer, Florian (eds.), Advances in Comparative Germanic Syntax, 281–306. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kibort, Anna. 2007. Extending the applicability of Lexical Mapping Theory. In Butt, Miriam & King, Tracy Holloway (eds.), Proceedings of the LFG’07 Conference, Standford University, 250–270. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications.Google Scholar
Kibort, Anna. 2008. On the syntax of ditransitive constructions. In Butt, Miriam & King, Tracy Holloway (eds.), Proceedings of the LFG’08 Conference, University of Sydney, 312–332. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications.Google Scholar
Kibort, Anna. 2014. Mapping out a construction inventory with LFG’s (Lexical) Mapping Theory. In Butt, Miriam & King, Tracy Holloway (eds.), Proceedings of the LFG’14 Conference, Ann Arbor, Michigan, 262–282. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications.Google Scholar
Kibort, Anna & Maling, Joan. 2015. Modelling the syntactic ambiguity of the active vs. passive impersonal in LFG. In Butt, Miriam & King, Tracy Holloway (eds.), Proceedings of the LFG’15 Conference, Tokyo, Japan, 145–165. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications.Google Scholar
Kinn, Kari. 2016. Referential vs. non-referential null subjects in Middle Norwegian. Nordic Journal of Linguistics 39(3), 277–310.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kroch, Anthony & Taylor, Ann. 2000. The Penn-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Middle English (PPCME2). Department of Linguistics, University of Pennsylvania. Second edition. https://www.ling.upenn.edu/hist-corpora/.Google Scholar
Kuhn, Jonas. 1999. The syntax and semantics of split NPs in LFG. In Corblin, Francis, Dobrovie-Sorin, Carmen & Marandin, Jean-Marie (eds.), Empirical Issues in Formal Syntax and Semantics 2, Selected Papers from the Colloque de Syntaxe et Sémantique á Paris (CSSP 1997) , vol. 2, 145–166. The Hague: Thesus.Google Scholar
Kuhn, Jonas. 2001. Resource sensitivity in the syntax-semantics interface and the German split NP construction. In Meurers, W. Detmar. & Kiss, Tibor (eds.), Constraint-Based Approaches to Germanic Syntax, 177–216. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications.Google Scholar
Lenerz, Jürgen. 1985. Zur Theorie syntaktischen Wandels: das expletive es in der Geschichte des Deutschen. In Abraham, Werner (ed.), Erklärende Syntax des Deutschen, 99–136. Tübingen: Gunter Narr.Google Scholar
Lødrup, Helge. 2011. Lexical-Functional Grammar: functional structure. In Robert, D. Borsley & Börjars, Kersti (eds.), Non-Transformational Syntax: Formal and Explicit Models of Grammar, 141–180. Oxford: Blackwell.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Maling, Joan & Sigurjónsdóttir, Sigríður. 2002. The new impersonal construction in Icelandic. The Journal of Comparative Germanic Linguistics 5(1), 97–142.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Platzack, Christer. 1983. Existential sentences in English, German, Icelandic and Swedish. In Karlsson, Fred (ed.), Papers from the 7th Scandinavian Conference of Linguistics, 80–100. Department of General Linguistics, University of Helsinki.Google Scholar
Platzack, Christer. 1985. Narrative inversion in Old Icelandic. Íslenskt mál 7, 127–144.Google Scholar
Randall, Beth. 2005. CorpusSearch2 User’s Guide. Philadelphia: Department of Linguistics, University of Pennsylvania. Philadelphia: Dept. of Linguistics, University of Pennsylvania. http://corpussearch.sourceforge.net/CS-manual/Contents.html.Google Scholar
Richards, Marc & Biberauer, Theresa. 2005. Explaining Expl. In Dikken, Marcel den & Tortora, Christina (eds.), The Function of Function Words and Functional Categories, 115–153. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rögnvaldsson, Eiríkur & Thráinsson, Höskuldur. 1990. On Icelandic word order once more. In Maling, Joan & Zaenen, Annie (eds.), Syntax and Semantics: Modern Icelandic Syntax, 3–40. San Diego, CA: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Rögnvaldsson, Eiríkur. 2002. ÞAÐ í fornu máli – og síðar. [ÞAÐ (it, there) in Old Icelandic – and later]. Íslenskt mál 24, 7–30.Google Scholar
Rögnvaldsson, Eiríkur, Sigurðsson, Einar Freyr, Ingason, Anton Karl & Wallenberg, Joel. 2012. The Icelandic Parsed Historical Corpus (IcePaHC). In Proceedings of LREC 2012, 1978–1984.Google Scholar
Santorini, Beatrice. 2010. Annotation manual for the Penn Historical Corpora and the PCEEC. Department of Linguistics, University of Pennsylvania. https://www.ling.upenn.edu/hist-corpora/annotation/index.html.Google Scholar
Sells, Peter. 2005. The peripherality of the Icelandic expletive. In Butt, Miriam & King, Tracy Holloway (eds.), Proceedings of the LFG’05 Conference, 408–428. Standford, CA: CSLI Publications.Google Scholar
Sigurðsson, Halldór Ármann. 1990. V1 declaratives and verb raising in Icelandic. In Maling, Joan & Zaenen, Annie (eds.), Syntax and Semantics: Modern Icelandic Syntax, 41–69. San Diego, CA: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Sigurðsson, Halldór Ármann. 2007. Argument features, clausal structure and the computation. In Bhattachayra, Tammoy, Reuland, Eric & Spathas, Giorgos (eds.), Argument Structure, 121–158. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sigurðsson, Halldór Ármann & Egerland, Verner. 2009. Impersonal null subjects in Icelandic and elsewhere. Studia Linguistica 63(1), 158–185.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Silva-Villar, Luis. 1996. The diachronic syntax of expletive creation. lnternational Journal of Basque Linguistics and Philology 30(1), 173–193.Google Scholar
Thráinsson, Höskuldur. 1979. On Complementation in Icelandic. New York: Garland.Google Scholar
Thráinsson, Höskuldur. 2007. The Syntax of Icelandic. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Vikner, Sten. 1995. Verb Movement and Expletives in the Germanic Languages. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Wallenberg, Joel C., Ingason, Anton Karl, Sigurðsson, Einar Freyr & Rögnvaldsson, Eiríkur. 2011. Icelandic Parsed Historical Corpus (IcePaHC), version 0.9. https://linguist.is/icelandic_treebank.Google Scholar
Zaenen, Annie. 1983. On syntactic binding. Linguistic Inquiry 14(3), 469–504.Google Scholar