Fróðskaparrit - 01.01.2008, Page 108

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THE BORROWING SCALE AND DANISH IN FAROESE
Danish through television, newspapers, com-
puter-games, magazines, schoolbooks, etc.
We can say that Faroese is the selected lan-
guage in language processing and that Dan-
ish is the active language. Danish has the
same function as Faroese; it selects lexical
items, forms sentences, generates surface
structures and makes a phonetic plan, but
Danish is not fed into the Articulator. For the
notion of active and selected language, see
de Bot (1992/2000:433).
As this is the case, its influence on the
syntactic structure is not totally unexpected.
The same would hold for impersonal double
object constructions as in:
(4a) Der blev givet hende tre bøger. (Dan.)
there-nom. were given-ppp her-obl. three
books-obl.
(4b) Tað blivu givnar henni tríggjar bøkur.(Far.)
there-nom. were given-ppp. her-dat. three
books-acc.
'Three books were given to her'.
(4c) *t>að voru gefnar henni (orjár bækur. (Icl.
there-nom. were given-ppp her-dat. three
books-acc.
'Three books were given her’.
The judgment test shows that pepople do
not view (4b) as marginal, as assumed in
Flolmberg (1994). The point I would like to
make here is that (4b) has very likely come
about as the result of Danish influence on
Faroese. (Figure 2).
Embedded V2 constructions are among
the best described constructions in Faroese
(Petersen 2000, Thráinsson 2000, see also the
resume in Thráinsson et al. (2004:438ff) and
references therein).
Standard Danish does not allow for Verb
+ Negation after so-called bridge verbs (5a),
whereas lcelandic does not allow for Nega-
tion + Verb after the same verb. Both struc-
tures are allowed in Faroese ((5b) and (5e)).
(5a) Flan spurgte, *om Jon kendte ikke Frida.
(Dan.)
he asked ifjohn knew not Frida.
(5b) Hann spurdi, um Jógvan kendi ikki Fríðu.
(Far.)
he asked if John knew not Frida.
(5c) Hann spurði, hvort Jón Jiekti ekki Fríðu.
(Icl.)
he asked ifjohn knew not Friða.
(5d) ...om Jon ikke kendte Frida. ...if John not knew Frida. (Dan.)
(5e) ...um Jógvan ikki kendi Fríðu. ... if John not knew Frida. (Far.)
(5f) ...*hvort Jón ekki (>ekti Fíðu. ... if John not knew Frida. (Icl.)
Thráinsson et al. (2004) assume that the
string Verb + Neg will gradually die out in
Faroese and that Faroese has developed a
system of its own, as it allows both the Main-
land Scandinavian pattern and the Insular
Scandinavian pattern here as well as in rela-
tive clauses, for example.
It is possible to explain the Negation +
Verb string as an inner change, as this word
order is allowed in topicalization:
(6) Ikki koyrdi Jógvan bilin
not drove-past John-nom. car-the-acc.
'John did not drove the car'
As Negation + Verb is possible in (6), one
could assume that this triggers the Negation
+ Verb of younger informants in embedded
V2 construction and that this change is not