Íslenskt mál og almenn málfræði - 01.01.2008, Page 123

ALEXANDER ANDRASON
The BÚNA-construction in Pidgin Icelandic
!• Introduction
The topic of this paper is a special construction often found in
Immigrant Icelandic. I shall refer to this construction as the BÚNA-
construction and it is exemplified below:1
(1) a. É búna kunna gera þetta.2
I finish know(inf.) do(inf.) this
i have known (knew) how to do this (it).’
b. É aldrei búna vera í Kína.
I never fínish(inf.) be(inf.) in China
‘I have never been to China.’
Here the form búna is derived from the Standard Icelandic (SI) vera
búinn að, which literally means “be finished to” but is commonly con-
sidered to be a variant of the Icelandic perfect.3 I shall argue that in
this kind of Immigrant Icelandic the sequence vera búinn að has been
reduced to a mono-morphemic bi-syllabic preverbal búna. In the
Process, the inflectional personal suffixes, the auxiliary verb vera and
aH types of agreement have been lost. In addition, the restrictions on
the the BÚNA-construction are different from those that hold for vera
búinn að in SI, as the examples in (1) suggest (to those familiar with
Ihe use of vera búinn að in Icelandic) and I shall maintain that this
construction is actually one of the characteristics of (developing)
Tidgin Icelandic. But before discussing the formal and functional
Properties of the construction, it is necessary to give some background
1 I would like to thank two anonymous reviewers and the editor for extensive
c°mments on a previous version of this paper.
The reason for the modified spelling (e.g. é for ég will be given below).
3 See e.g. the paper by Larsson in this volume and references cited there. The
Editor
íslenskt mál 30 (2008), 121-140. © 2009 íslenska málfrœðifélagið, Reykjavík.