Íslenskt mál og almenn málfræði - 01.01.1994, Qupperneq 68

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Eiríkur Rögnvaldsson
Taylor, Ann. 1990. Clitics and Configurationality in Ancient Greek. Doktorsritgerð,
University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia.
Þorbjörg Hróarsdóttir. 1995. Setningafræðilegar breytingar á 19. öld. Þróun þriggja
málbreytinga. MA-ritgerð í íslenskri málfræði. Háskóla Islands, Reykjavík.
Þorsteinn G. Indriðason. 1987. Skýrsla um orðaröð í sagnlið. Óprentuð ritgerð, Háskóla
Islands, Reykjavík.
Þóra Björk Hjartardóttir. 1993. Getið í eyðurnar. Um eyður fyrir frumlög og andlög í
eldri íslensku. Málvisindastofnun Háskóla íslands, Reykjavík.
SUMMARY
The purpose of this paper is to try to account for the variations in post-Infl word
order in Old Icelandic. The IP in Old Icelandic was clearly head-initial, with movement
of the finite verb to Infl accounting for the obligatory verb-second word order. The Old
Icelandic VP, on the other hand, exhibits many different word order pattems which are
not found in Modem Icelandic. However, it must be noted that some of these pattems
are very rare, whereas others are frequent. In addition, some of the logically possible
pattems do not seem to occur at all in existing texts. This shows that the word order in
the VP was not completely free, as sometimes has been suggested. The ‘gaps’ in the
pattern can be used as arguments for adopting a certain analysis of the variation, i.e.,
a variant of the so-called ‘double base’ hypothesis.
The frequency of both ‘pure’ and ‘mixed’ OV word order pattems seems to have
been relatively stable for at least seven centuries in the history of Icelandic. Because of
the frequency and stability of OV-orders, together with the distribution of pronominal
objects and particles, it is not feasible to assume that the VP in Old Icelandic was
uniformly either head-initial or head-final. By assuming that the head parameter was
unspecified, we can account for the great majority of all Old Icelandic sentences without
positing any movement of constituents of the VP; this appears to be the most natural
way of accounting for the variation.
Free word order and many instances of empty categories make it seem a reasonable
assumption that children would have had difficulties in fixing the value of the head
parameter. When the frequency of Stylistic Fronting dropped, the expletive subject
það was introduced, and pro-drop became ungrammatical, more and more sentences
came to have surface VO-order. Around 1800, the VO-order had become so dominant
that children could begin to set the head parameter to ‘initial’ and as a result, OV-
sentences disappeared from the language in a relatively short time in the first half of
the nineteenth century.
Eiríkur Rögnvaldsson
Heimspekideild Háskóla Islands
Arnagarði við Suðurgötu
IS-101 Reykjavík, ÍSLAND
eirikur@rhi.hi.is