Íslenskt mál og almenn málfræði - 01.01.1981, Page 78

76 Halldór Ármann Sigurðsson
Stefán Einarsson. 1945. Icelandic. Grammar. Texts. Glossary. The Johns Hopkins
Press, Baltimore.
af Trampe, Peter, & Áke Viberg. 1972. Allmdn sprakteori och grammatik.
LiberLáromdel (Gleerups), Lund.
SUMMARY
This paper deals with the so called “complex conjunctions” in Icelandic, such as
af því að (literally ‘because of it that’, i. e. ‘beause’), þangað sem (lit. ‘to there
which’), etc. Around 50 phrases of this kind have traditionally been classified as
(subordinating) conjunctions in Icelandic and a similar categorization is well
known in grammars of other modern European languages (cf. e. g. Jespersen
1969) and Latin.
It is shown in this paper that the syntactic behavior of these phrases or „con-
junctions” is not at all what one would expect it to be if they are simply analyzed
as conjunctions. Rather they behave as if they were composed of an adverbial
phrase (e. g. af því) plus one of the common simple conjunctions in Icelandic
(e. g. að, sem). In addition, the occurrence of parts of these conjunctions, i. e. the
adverbial phrases (af því, etc.), is in no way limited to the „conjunctions" in
question. Therefore it is argued that these “complex conjunctions” should on
syntactic and morphological grounds be analyzed as sequences of adverbial phrases
plus regular subordinating conjunctions (af því + að, þangað + sem, etc.).
It is of general theoretical interest that this analysis shows that af því að S,
þangað sem S, etc. are complex adverbial phrases that are rather similar to
the well known complex noun phrases (NP að S like sú staðreynd að S). It is
shown for instance that the subordinate clauses (að S, sem S) can be extraposed
from the adverbial heads in very much the same way as they can from NP-heads.
Háskóla íslands,
Reykjavík