Íslenskt mál og almenn málfræði - 01.01.2002, Blaðsíða 34

32
Joan Maling
Zakhava-Nekrasova 1980). Not included in the Icelandic list are
dative subject verbs, of which there are at least 300 (see Jóhannes
Gísli Jónsson 1997, Jóhanna Barðdal 2001b:136 — approximately
175 more take accusative subjects). If adjectives which take dative
subjects are included, e.g. mér er kalt ‘I feel cold’, then the number of
dative subject predicates is increased by perhaps another two hundred.
One 40,000 word corpus of both spoken and written Icelandic con-
tained 1268 accusative direct objects as compared to 479 dative direct
objects; thus the ratio of accusative to dative objects was less than 3:1
and dative represented about 25% of all object tokens in both the spo-
ken and written corpus (Jóhanna Barðdal 2001b:89). I don’t know of
any comparable counts for German or Slavic languages, but would
expect to find a significantly lower percentage of direct objects
marked dative. In the Negra II-corpus (2001) of German, which con-
tains 20, 602 sentences, there were 12,747 accusative NPs as com-
pared to only 1966 datives.3 While it is difficult to compare these
numbers directly to Jóhanna Barðdal’s count of object case-marking,
since passivized accusative objects do not appear in the count of
accusatives, and the datives include free or adverbial datives, which
are arguably not objects (cf. section 2.2), the difference in relative fre-
quency seems clear.
It is difficult if not impossible to find a semantic characterization
of dative objects which will include all dative verbs while at the same
time excluding apparently synonymous verbs which do not govem
dative. As has often been pointed out (cf. Ásta Svavarsdóttir &
Margrét Jónsdóttir 1988:19, Maling 1990, María Anna Garðarsdóttir
1990, Eiríkur Rögnvaldsson 1994), the case on a verbal object cannot
reliably be predicted from the verb’s meaning, since verbs with simi-
lar meanings may take different case frames.4 Consider, for example,
3 I am grateful to Heike Wiese for obtaining this information from Stefanie
Dipper, of the University of Stuttgart. Dipper estimates that the relative frequency of
accusative to dative objects for German lies somewhere between 5:1 and 9:1 (e-mail
to Heike Wiese dated August 9, 2002).
4 Icelandic has four morphological cases: nominative (N), accusative (A), dative
(D), genitive (G). The case frames associated with a verb’s arguments are listed in the