Íslenskt mál og almenn málfræði - 01.01.2002, Page 38

36
Joan Maling
(3) Noun:
a. dúkur ‘tablecloth’
b. kalk ‘chalk’
c. malbik ‘asphalt’
d. salt ‘salt’
e. skraut ‘decoration’
f. smjör ‘butter’
Denominal verb:
dúka borðið ‘cover the table with a table-
cloth’
kalka vegginn ‘white-wash the wall’
malbika götuna ‘put asphalt on the street’
salta fiskinn ‘salt the fish’
skreyta kökuna ‘decorate the cake’
smyrja brauðið ‘butter the bread’
Psych-verbs (predicates denoting a psychological state of mind) typi-
cally take default case on their objects: accusative if the subject is
nominative (e.g. elska ‘love’, hata ‘hate’), or nominative if the subject
is dative (e.g. líka ‘like’, leiðast ‘be bored with’). Only a very few
psych-verbs like (van)treysta ‘(mis)trust’ have dative objects, and at
least one psych-verb takes a genitive object (s.akna ‘miss’). On the
other hand, some other types of non-agentive dyadic (transitive) verbs
regularly govem dative, e.g. verbs of comparison, such as líkjast
‘resemble’ and samsvara ‘correspond to’ (see section 4.8.2).
2.2 Sources ofdative objects
If accusative is so firmly established as the unmarked case on verbal
objects, why, then, do so many Icelandic verbs govem dative?
Nygaard (1906, §99) observes that the dative in Old Icelandic is a
“sammensat kasus” — a melting pot of IE instrumental, ablative and
locative cases together with the tme (“egentlig”) dative of recipients
and experiencers. Halldór Halldórsson (n.d.) goes so far as to suggest
that all dative objects in modem Icelandic are derived historically
from nonobjects.7 For example, it is clear that many dative objects
originated from old instrumental adverbials. As Halldór Halldórsson
notes (n.d., p. 54), it is often hard to tell whether a postverbal dative
NP is govemed by the verb or whether it is an (ungovemed) adverbial.
Consider the examples in (4):
7 “Öllum þágufallsliðum, sem frá máltilf. íslenzkri eru andl., er það sameiginlegt, að
þeir eru ekki í fyrstu andlög” (p.53). [All dative phrases which according to Icelandic
intuition are objects have in common that they are not in origin objects. — JM]