Íslenskt mál og almenn málfræði - 01.01.1980, Síða 177

JOAN MALING
Inversion in Embedded Clauses in
Modern Icelandic
0. Introduction
Word order in Icelandic prose is quite free, especially in main
clauses. Although the most usual, or unmarked, word order in declara-
tive sentences is subject + finite verb + . .., almost any sentence
constituent can be found in sentence-initial position. I will call this
phenomenon, namely the fronting of stressed elements of the predicate
to sentence-initial position, Topicalization.1 Whatever the discourse
function of Topicalization may be, there is an obvious syntactic con-
sequence: the finite verb must then be moved into second position by
inverting with the subject noun phrase (NP), if any. I will refer to this
general feature of Icelandic word order as the Verb-Second Con-
straint (V/2).
In this article inverted word orders in modem Icelandic prose will
be studied in order to test the generality of V/2 as a principle of Ice-
landic word order. This study is limited to embedded clauses, where
V/2 applies most generally. The paper is organized as follows. In Sec-
tion 1,1 argue for a general principle of what counts as second position,
particularly in questions and relative clauses. In Section 2, I look at
oxamples of inversion, and argue for a distinction between two kinds
°f fronting processes, Topicalization and another kind of inversion
which I will refer to as Stylistic Inversion. I argue that Stylistic In-
version, unlike Topicalization, applies only in clauses containing a sub-
ject gap, and that this kind of inversion can therefore be viewed as a
1 The term „Topicalization" may be somewhat of a misnomer, but it has be-
come standard usage in the transformational Iiterature. It is unclear if the discourse
function of Topicalization is related to the Topic/Comment distinction; moreover,
different languages may put the same syntactic construction to different uses. For
some discussion of the discourse function of Topicalization in Icelandic see Thrá-
msson (1979:64-66).