Íslenskt mál og almenn málfræði - 01.01.2010, Page 134

132 Hjalmar P. Petersen
up. Nearly everything was in Danish and this has presumably affected
their language.
Analytic comparatives (and superlatives) were accepted by all speak-
ers. They are found with inherited adjectives, as well as with compounds.
The statement by Höskuldur Thráinsson et al. (2004) suggesting that
this construction is spreading is supported by my findings. This change
may also be older than the spread of DO+PP after verbs like geva (even
when the complement in the PP is inanimate). The example with meira
birgur ‘more fit’ found in the speech of a speaker born in the beginning of
the 1900S is suggestive in this connection (cf. (9) above).
5. Conclusion
To conclude, we can raise the question mentioned at the beginning of the
paper:
(11) Are the changes under discussion examples of internal changes or
external changes?
I do not want to take an either-or stance on this matter, as I think that
there are indeed multiple factors at work. The functional parallelism to
pre-existing analytic forms like senda DO+PP and meira ótolandi ‘more
intolerable’ has no doubt facilitated the diffusion of the changes in
Faroese. But I propose that the changes are spreading more readily as a
result of the contact situation with Danish, where the analytic construc-
tions are more common. In other words: The changes under considera-
tion are internally motivated by pre-existing structures but they are accel-
erated by the contact situation, where speakers hear and read a lot of
Danish. If this were not the case, we would expect the younger genera-
tions to be more likely to use and accept the analytic constructions. As
shown above, however, the older generations are more likely to accept the
prepositional variant DO+PP with certain ditranstive verbs. This can be
explained by the fact that the older generations used Danish textbooks in
schools to a greater extent than the younger ones.