Jóhanna Barðdal
The Case of Subjects with Impersonal Verbs in Insular ScandinavianBritish Academy: Research report 2002 by Thórhallur Eythórsson
The objective of this one-year pilot project was to measure systematically a major syntactic change currently under way in two closely related languages, Icelandic and Faroese (Insular Scandinavian). These languages are unusual in that subjects do not necessarily occur in nominative case. Rather, "impersonal verbs" have accusative or dative ("quirky") subjects, presenting a challenge to traditional assumptions about the properties of subjects. The change in subject case-marking is of two kinds. On the one hand, accusative and dative are being substituted with nominative (Nominative Substitution). On the other hand, there is also a tendency to generalise dative at the expense of accusative ("Dative Sickness") with certain verbs (subject experiencer verbs, denoting feelings, physical sensation and cognition). The case changes in Icelandic were last investigated 20 years ago (Svavarsdóttir 1982, testing 11-year-old children), but Faroese has not been subjected to a comparable extensive investigation before.
The present study consisted of two parts: (1) written tests which were administered to children and adults, and (2) an examination of spoken language corpora. Work on both parts was carried out by research assistants in Iceland and the Faroes, supervised by the principal investigator. Approximately 900 pupils (most born in 1990) in 20 schools were tested in Iceland along with 340 pupils of the same age in nine schools the Faroe Islands. 55 adults in both countries were tested as a control group. In the tests the participants were asked to replace a proper name with a pronoun, thereby indirectly selecting the case of the subject. Children from different parts of Iceland and the Faroes were tested to check if there was any regional variation in the use of subject case in the two languages. The tests were not compulsory and were conducted anonymously, but the participants were asked to give their age, gender, native language and the education of their parents (or guardians), as well as to state whether they had lived elsewhere (e.g. abroad) for an extended period. Permission from the proper governmental and local authorities, as well as from head-teachers and parents (guardians), was obtained in advance to the investigation. Furthermore, relevant data from corpora of natural speech were collected to check whether they might yield different results. The corpora included printouts from an Icelandic radio call-in programme and a corpus of interviews in Faroese (approximately the equivalent of ten hours of speech for each language).
The main results of the investigation can be summarised as follows: (1) Iceland: (a) "Dative Sickness" among 11-year-olds is widespread in all parts of the country and has increased ca. 25% since 1982. (b) Most participants exhibit some degree of "Dative Sickness", i.e. they substitute dative for accusative with at least some verbs. (c) The extent of "Dative Sickness" varies according to verbs, ranging from 25.4-60.0%. (d) The occurrence of dative with verbs where dative case is original ranges from 65.7-95.1%. (e) Speakers make a clear distinction between verbs with nominative subject and verbs with "quirky" subject. (f) There is a certain correlation between subject case and the gender of speakers, as shown by the fact that female participants use original ("correct") case more than male participants do. (g) There is also a correlation between the use of subject case by the pupils and the education of their parents; for example, the higher the education of the parents, the less frequent the substitution of dative for accusative among the participants. (2) The Faroe Islands: (a) Accusative is virtually extinct as a subject case in Faroese, both among children and adults. (b) Dative case occurs to some degree with experiencer verbs, both where it is original (34.3-82.2%) and where it has replaced accusative (3.8-15.7%). (c) Nominative Substitution is considerably more robust in Faroese than in Icelandic, ranging from 82.2-99% with experiencer verbs where accusative is the original case on subjects, but 14.3-60.1% with verbs which originally took dative subject. (d) The sociolinguistic aspects of subject case-marking are less evident in the Faroes than in Iceland. (3) The results from the examination of the spoken language corpora are different in the two countries. In particular, the extent of Nominative Substitution is more limited in the Icelandic corpus than in the Faroese one, a finding which mirrors that of the written tests.
Our research hypothesis was that "Dative Sickness" is governed by lexical semantics, whereas Nominative Substitution is purely syntactic in nature. Hence, we predicted that "Dative Sickness" would only be found with subject experiencer verbs, but Nominative Substitution should apply to all verbs that standardly take accusative or dative subjects. The results of this investigation can be said to have confirmed this hypothesis. This is particularly clear in Icelandic, whereas Faroese exhibits a development towards an elimination of "quirky" subjects. The Faroese situation, however, also follows from our hypothesis, insofar as Nominative Substitution, as the more general type of change has pervaded the domain of the more specific "Dative Sickness", rather than the other way around, which would have been unexpected.
| Oppdatert 16.03.2006 av JB |
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