Íslenskt mál og almenn málfræði - 01.01.1992, Blaðsíða 88

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Halldór Ármann Sigurðsson
Sigríður Sigurjónsdóttir. 1987. Spumarsetningar í máli tveggja íslenskra bama. Kandí-
datsritgerð í íslenskri málfræði, Háskóla íslands, Reykjavík.
Taraldsen, Knut Tarald. 1985. On the Distribution of Nominative Objects in Finnish.
Muysken, Peter, og Henk van Riemsdijk (ritstj.): Features and Projections, bls.
139-161. Foris, Dordrecht.
Zaenen, Annie. 1985. Extraction Rules in lcelandic. Garland Publishing, New York.
Áfarli, Tor. 1989. On Sentence Structure in Scandinavian Languages. Working Papers
in Scandinavian Syntax 44:1-15.
SUMMARY
This paper reports on an investigation of agreement in sentences with a dative
subject and a nominative object, such as (1) and (2):
(1) Henni leiddust strákamir.
her(D) bored(3pl.) the boys(N)
‘She found the boys boring.’
(2) *Henni leiddumst við.
her(D) bored(lph) we(N)
Nine informants answered a questionnaire of 125 sentences, 74 of which contained
the Dat-Nom construction exemplified in (1) and (2) (but the answers of two of the
informants proved unreliable, and were thus not used).
The major results of the investigation were as follows:
(3) a Nominative objects in the third person normally require verb agreement;
for most of the informants, however, nominative third person plural objects
of the verb líka ‘like, find agreeable’ allow nonagreement of the verb,
which then shows up in the default third person singular form; in addition,
nonagreement in sentences with leiðast ‘find boring’ was only judged
mildly unacceptable by most of the informants
b Most speakers find sentences with a nominative object in the first or the
second person unacceptable, irrespective of whether such sentences have
agreement; however, one informant accepted such sentences, in particular
when they do not have verb agreement (in which case the verb shows up
in the default third person singular)
These results are analyzed such that nominative arguments must (normally) trigger full
agreement, with the limitation that nominative objects are blocked from controlling
“true” person agreement. It is also suggested that the third person is “no person”, in
contrast with the first and the second person. It follows that first and second person
nominative objects are ruled out (for most speakers), by a cl ash between the requirement
that there be full agreement and the blocking of object control of true person agreement.