Íslenskt mál og almenn málfræði - 01.01.2002, Page 65

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Það rignir þágufalli á íslandi
4.3 Experiencers and verbs taking experiencer objects
Most experiencer subjects are actually nominative (cf. Jóhannes
Gísli Jónsson 1997, Jóhanna Barðdal 2001b:100, 187), but it is
dative experiencers which have received the most attention in the
linguistic literature cross-linguistically. In Icelandic at least, dative
experiencers are typically grammatical subjects: mér leiðist ‘I was
bored’, mér leið vel ‘I was well’, mér er kalt ‘I feel cold’. Such
predicates have therefore not been included in the list of dative
objects. As has often been noted (Halldór Armann Sigurðsson 1989,
Jóhanna Barðdal 1992, inter alia), many predicates taking dative
experiencers exhibit case alternations: the subject is marked dative
if it is a human (or at least animate) experiencer, but nominative oth-
erwise (i.e. if the argument is not an experiencer, but a theme, the
thing that undergoes the change of state or location denoted by the
predicate):
(54) Dative experiencer subject: Nominative theme subject:
a. Henni batnaði strax. Veðrið batnaði strax.
‘She(D) recovered immediately.’ ‘The weather(N) improved immediately.’
b. Henni hitnar í kinnum. Steinamir hitna í sólinni.
she(D) gets-hot in cheeks stones-the get-hot in sun-the
‘Her cheeks are getting warm.’ ‘The stones(N) heat up in the sunshine.’
c. Henni er kalt. Hún er köld.
‘She(D) feels cold.’ ‘She is cool/cold (figuratively).’
With nominative case on the subject, the adjective kaldur(m)/köld
(f)lkalt(n) normally has a figurative meaning when predicated of an
animate being, but it can also mean literally cold, for example, to
describe an avalanche survivor whose body temperature is cold as a
result of having been buried in the snow for hours.
Experiencer objects also tend to be marked dative:
(55) greiða barninu ‘comb the child’s hair’ (lit. “comb the
child(D)”), hita/hlýja e-m ‘warm somebody(D)’, orna sér
‘warm oneself(D)’, strjúka kettinum ‘pat the cat(D)’, þvo barn-
inu ‘wash the child(D)’