Íslenskt mál og almenn málfræði - 01.01.2002, Page 36

34
Joan Maling
in the Prologue to The Flamingo’s Smile, one of his many books on
the laws of natural history, “quirkiness and meaning are my two not-
so-contradictory themes”. It is impossible not to notice and comment
on certain semantic generalizations (for a discussion of verbs govem-
ing oblique subjects, especially experiencers, see Jóhannes Gísli
Jónsson 1997-98). Even for a novel or an unfamiliar verb, native
speakers are often very certain about what case it would govem; that
certainty surely reflects semantic generalizations goveming the distri-
bution of morphological case in the language. Many linguistic quirks
tum out to be quite sensible in retrospect, that is “sensible oddities”,
the hen’s teeth of the linguistic world. This is certainly tme of case-
marking in Icelandic and it is one of the reasons why it has fascinated
me for a long time. While some of my work on this topic is intended
mainly for the theoretically interested linguist (Maling 1990, 1991,
2001; Yip, Maling & Jackendoff (henceforth YMJ) 1987; Zaenen,
Maling & Thráinsson (henceforth ZMT) 1985), I have also attempted
to do more practical or applied work on Icelandic case marking. Thus
the compilation in Maling (1996) is on the one hand intended as a
research tool for understanding the relation between semantics and
morphological case-marking, as well as for studying diachronic
changes in case frames, and on the other as a practical aid for foreign
students of Icelandic. The generalizations extracted in the present
paper should also prove helpful to the second language leamer, who
discovers early on the limitations and inadequacies of even the best
dictionaries, monolingual as well as interlingual, but they are also of
more general theoretical interest as they show possible relations
between morphological case marking and the syntactic and semantic
properties of arguments.
The paper is organized as follows: Section 2 compares the status
and relative frequency of accusative and dative case in Old and
Modem Icelandic and shows that dative is by no means retreating in
Icelandic. Rather it seems to spreading with some semantic classes of
verbs, both as a subject case and object case. Sections 3 and 4 state
some generalizations about the distribution of the dative as an object
case in Modem Icelandic, with section 3 being devoted to ditransitive