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SUMMARY
The purpose of this paper is to show that Old Icelandic must be assumed to have had
oblique (quirky) subjects. However, the author emphasizes that he is mainly con-
cerned with syntactic change, not the subject or non-subject status of certain pre-ver-
bal oblique NPs. His arguments are meant to show that the NPs in question behave in
exactly the same manner in Old Icelandic as they do in the modem language; and
hence, if they are analyzed as subjects in Modern lcelandic, they should be analyzed
accordingly in Old Icelandic.
In the beginning of the paper, the author discusses the problem of giving a defini-
tion of the term subject. He then gives examples from Old Icelandic of various types
of sentences with oblique NPs, which would pass most traditional subject tests in
corresponding sentences from Modern Icelandic.
In the following sections, the author reviews earlier studies on oblique subjects in
Old Icelandic. He claims that even though many of the traditional subject tests either
are inconclusive, or not applicable to historical data, no conclusive evidence has been
presented against the existence of oblique subjects in Old Icelandic. In particular, he
claims that the behaviour of imperative subject deletion, control (or Equi), and reflex-
ivization cannot be used as evidence against the subjecthood of pre-verbal oblique
NPs in Old Icelandic.
In the remaining sections, the author brings forth new evidence for the subjecthood
of the NPs in question. This regards word order in both main and subordinate claus-
es, exceptional case-marking (subject-to-object raising), control, subject-to-subject
raising, and long-distance reflexivization. With respect to all these constructions, the
pre-verbal oblique NPs appear to have behaved exactly like ordinary nominative sub-
jects (excluding the morphology, of course).