Íslenskt mál og almenn málfræði - 01.01.2002, Side 32

30 Eiríkur Rögnvaldsson
málbreytinga. Málvísindastofnun Háskóla íslands, Reykjavík. [Upphaflega
M.A.-ritgerð höfundar.]
Þorbjörg Hróarsdóttir og Halldór Ármann Sigurðsson. 1994. íslensk setningalýsing
— aukasetningar. Óprentað handrit í eigu Málvísindastofnunar Háskóla Islands,
Reykjavík.
SUMMARY
'ÞAÐ (‘it, there’) in Old Icelandic — and later’
Keywords: expletives, language change, Old Icelandic, weather constructions,
impersonal passives, existential sentences, transitive expletives, extra-
position, spoken language
The purpose of this paper is to try to trace the origins of the expletive það ‘it, there’
in Icelandic. The first section is an overview of different types of sentences beginn-
ing with það in Modem Icelandic, and thus provides a necessary background for this
study.
It has usually been claimed that Old Icelandic did not have any expletives (Jakob
Jóh. Smári 1920; Faarlund 1990). I have looked at all the 16,583 instances of það in
a corpus comprised of the main Old Icelandic narrative texts, and among those there
are no instances of expletive það in weather constructions, existential sentences, or
impersonal passives. However, það is very frequent in extraposition constructions,
and in some of those, it seems rather likely that it has the function of an expletive.
The oldest unequivocal examples I have found of expletive það in existential sen-
tences and impersonal passives are in stories that were translated from English around
1500, and more such examples, together with the first attested example of expletive
það in weather constructions, are found in the first Icelandic translation of The New
Testament, from 1540. However, such examples are almost never found in texts from
the next two centuries.
In the first half of the 19th century, the frequency of expletive það in various sen-
tence types rises rapidly, as shown by Þorbjörg Hróarsdóttir (1998). This may in part
be due to the introduction of new types of texts, such as informal personal letters
written by uneducated people. Towards the middle of the century, the frequency and
use of expletive það appears to have become similar to its frequency and use in
Modem Icelandic.
Eiríkur Rögnvaldsson
Háskóla Islands
Arnagarði við Suðurgötu
IS-101 Reykjavík, ÍSLAND
eirikur@hi.is