Íslenskt mál og almenn málfræði - 01.01.1985, Side 144

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Christer Platzack
also to express commands and direct questions, as in the Swedish
examples (12)a and b below:
(12)a Du gillar möjligen inte ishockey?
‘You like possibly not icehockey’
i.e. Do you perhaps like icehockey?
b Du stáller genast tillbaka flaskan!
‘You put immediately back the bottle’
i.e. Put back the bottle immediately!
Thus, since the prototypic use of a construction does not exclude other
uses of it, it should not be surprising that the VS-order may be used to
express statements as well as direct questions. Naturally, we might ask
ourselves why this use is more frequent in Icelandic than in the other
Germanic languages, but this is a question of quite another type than
the ones usually put forward in relation to narrative inversion (but cf.
Sigurðsson (1984)).
If the considerations above are accepted, we may conclude that the
frequent use of declarative VS-sentences in Old Icelandic Sagas has
nothing to do with a typological difference between Old Icelandic and
other Germanic languages: the underlying system regulating the posi-
tions of the finite verb and the subject is the same in all the Germanic
languages with the verb second constraint.
REFERENCES
Alving, H. 1916. Det grammatiska subjektets plats i den narrativa satsen i svenskan.
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Besten, Hans den. 1983. On the Interaction of Root Transformations and Lexical
Deletive Rules. W. Abraham (ed.): On the Formal Nature of the Westgermania,
PP- 47 — 131. John Benjamins, Amsterdam.
Chomsky, Noam. 1981. Lectures on Government and Binding. Foris, Dordrecht.
Diderichsen, Poul. 1941. Sætningsbygningen i skaanske Lov. Acta Philologica Scan-
dinavica 15:1 —252.
Emonds, Joseph. 1976. A Transformational Approach lo English Syntax. Academic
Press, New York.
Falk, Hjalmar, & Alf Torp. 1900. Dansk-norskens syntax i historisk fremstilling. H.
Aschehoug & Co., Kristiania.
Givón, Talmy. 1977. The Drift from VSO to SVO in Biblical Hebrew: The Pragmatics