Jóhannes Gísli Jónsson

Variation in subject case marking in Insular Scandinavian

The Insular Scandinavian (IS) languages, Icelandic and Faroese, exhibit variation in subject case marking, primarily pertaining to an older idiosyncratic case and an innovative case that instantiates a regular pattern. This variation occurs to a considerable degree at the level of the individual speaker. We argue that this intra-speaker variation in IS involves optionality within one grammar and not competition between two different grammars or dialects in the sense of Kroch (1989, 1994). Mainly on the basis of data from the so-called Dative Substitution (DS) in Icelandic, we show that this variation does not involve any kind of parameter, and that it is not the result of dialect contact, as the grammar competition analysis would entail.

Structured exceptions and case selection in Insular Scandinavian

The diachronic development of case selection in Insular Scandinavian (Icelandic and Faroese) provides strong support for a dichotomy of structured exceptions, which display partial productivity, and arbitrary exceptions, which are totally unproductive. Focusing on two kinds of exceptional case, we argue that verbs taking accusative experiencer subjects form a similarity cluster on the basis of shared lexical semantic properties, thus enabling new lexical items to be attracted to the cluster. By contrast, verbs taking genitive objects have no common semantic properties that could be the source of partial productivity.

Covert nominative and dative subjects in Faroese

T his paper presents the results of a recent survey of dative subjects in Faroese, using a judgment task and data elicited from interviews with native speakers. The results indicate that dative subjects are in the process of being replaced by nominative subjects. Moreover, dative subjects behave like nominative subjects in that they may trigger number agreement with the finite verb. It is hypothesized that dative subjects in Faroese have an unrealized nominative case assigned by T(ense) and this makes number agreement possible. This hypothesis is argued to account for certain differences between Faroese and Icelandic, most notably the fact that verbs with dative subjects take accusative objects in Faroese but nominative objects in Icelandic.

Two types of case variation

Building on data from Icelandic, this article argues that there are two kinds of case variation, formal and semantic. The first type features lexical case as one of the variants whereas the second type involves structural vs. inherent case. The semantic effect found with the latter kind of variation follows from the semantic requirements associated with inherent case and these may cut across different uses of the same verb. It is also shown how the weak status of disappearing lexical case manifests itself in the grammar of Icelandic and Faroese.

Reflexive sig is an argument

This paper argues that the simple reflexive pronoun sig is unambiguously a thematic argument in Icelandic. This is shown to be true not only of sig with naturally reflexive verbs but also of inherently reflexive sig . This view is mainly supported by two sets of facts: (i) that sig is impossible with verbs that fail to theta-mark their object (middles and anticausatives), and (ii) that case assignment works the same way for sig as for non- reflexive DP arguments. Potential counterarguments against my view involving focalization and reflexive passives are argued not to be valid.

The Icelandic (Pilot) Project in ScanDiaSyn

In this paper we outline the Icelandic research plans in the Scandinavian Dialect Syntax project and explain why we have made these plans the way we have. We begin by reporting on a pilot project that was conducted in Iceland 2004-2005, explain its nature and describe the resulting plans. As will be seen, our research project includes the collection and analysis of spoken language corpora (“spontaneous speech” of different kinds), collection of syntactic material by using different elicitation techniques (including written questionnaires and interviews), and the comparison of this material. The spoken language corpora are listed and described in the second section of the paper. In the third section we describe how our present (and future) work relates to some previous work done on syntactic variation in Icelandic (and Faroese) and offer some thoughts on the nature of syntactic variation in general.