Íslenskt mál og almenn málfræði - 01.01.2002, Qupperneq 33

JOAN MALING
Það rignir þágufalli á íslandi
Verbs with Dative Objects in Icelandic
1. Introduction
One of the striking features of Icelandic syntax is the frequency with
which verbs seem to govem the dative case.1 This is all the more strik-
ing when compared to German, a closely related Germanic language
which also retains four morphological cases: nominative, accusative,
dative, genitive. The University Dictionary Project in Reykjavík
('Orðabók Háskólans, henceforth OH) includes some 16,000 verbs,
many of them intransitive, as entries. Maling (1996) contains a list of
more than 750 verbs which in at least one sense occur with a dative
object; this number would increase by at least 70 verbs if the borrow-
ings and other slang verbs listed by Jóhanna Barðdal (2001b: 121)
were included. The corresponding number of verbs for German is
approximately 140,2 and for Russian fewer than 60 (Pulkina &
1 TMs paper has been a long time in the making. Höskuldur Þráinsson and two
anonymous reviewers provided extensive comments on the organization and presenta-
tion as well as the content of this paper. I am grateful to them, and to members of the
audience of the Linguistics Discussion Group at the University of Iceland where this
material was presented on September 4, 2000. Special thanks to Kristín Bjamadóttir for
her help in accessing the collections of the Orðabók Háskólans, and to Helgi Skúli
Kjartansson, Jóhannes Gísli Jónsson, Jón Axel Harðarson, Kjartan Ottosson, Höskuldur
Þráinsson, Jóhanna Barðdal, Keneva Kunz, Kristín Bjamadóttir and Þórhallur
Eyþórsson for providing numerous examples and hours of fascinating discussion.
Höskuldur provided many example sentences for the verbs in the 1996 compiled list,
checked the English translations, and provided me with a copy of Halldór Halldórsson’s
lecture notes. The usual disclaimers apply. Preparation of this article and the compila-
tion of Icelandic verbs goveming dative was supported in part by a grant from the
National Science Foundation to Brandeis University, Grant No. DBS-9223725.
2 See the appendix for a hst of monotransitive German verbs which govem dative on
their objects. Many of these verbs have prepositional prefixes which transparently con-
tribute a goal-reading to the verbal object: zu- (21 verbs), nach- (11), vor- (4) and unter-
(3), plus another 12 verbs containing the prefrx ent- with the ablative sense of ‘from’.
íslenskt mál 24 (2002), 31-105. © 2003 íslenska málfrœðifélagið, Reykjavík.