Íslenskt mál og almenn málfræði - 01.01.2002, Síða 72

70 Joan Maling
dative.24 This is true, for instance, of verbs meaning ‘throw’, ‘kick’,
‘roll’ or the like:
(71) fleygja, henda, hreyta, kasta, varpa ‘throw’; skutla ‘throw, har-
poon’, snara ‘throw, snare, lasso’; sparka, spyrna, þruma, þrusa
‘kick’; velta, rúlla ‘roll’; mjaka, ‘move slowly, inch, eke’, aka
e-u til ‘inch something about’; slefa ‘drag’; ýta ‘push’
On the other hand, several basic verbs meaning ‘move’ govem
accusative:
(72) fœra ‘move’, flytja ‘move, transport’, hreyfa ‘move’, ferja
‘ferry’, reka (fé) ‘drive (sheep)’ (vs. smala fénu ‘gather the
sheep(D)’)
These basic verbs have many figurative uses, so they are perhaps felt
to belong less clearly to this class. Stefán Einarsson (1945:108) sug-
gests that the semantic class is perhaps restricted to “verbs denoting
(quick) movement”. While it is tme that draga ‘drag, tow’ govems
accusative, many verbs denoting slow movement govem dative, as
can be seen from the list in (71) (cf. ýta ‘push’; velta, rúlla ‘roll’;
mjaka, aka til ‘move slowly, eke, inch about’; slefa ‘drag, pull’ (from
Danish slæbe)), so speed seems not to be a relevant factor. Thus there
is no obvious difference of speed in the examples in (73):
(73) a. Hann dró bátinn að landi.
‘He dragged/towed the boat(A) to shore.’
b. Hann slefaði bátnum að landi.
‘He dragged/towed the boat(D) to shore.’
c. ... átti að fá mig til að slefa bátnum hans (OH)
... was supposed to get me to drag his boat(D)’
24 This case altemation may strike the second language leamer as the opposite of
the common case alternation found with certain prepositions in Icelandic (as in
German), where Accusative marks movement towards (hreyfing) and Dative marks
static location (staðarmerking). The distinction is that dative on verbal objects marks
the thing that moves, a notion which does not come into play with the relevant prepo-
sitional objects.