Íslenskt mál og almenn málfræði - 01.01.2010, Page 132

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Hjalmar P. Petersen
(9) Tá var eg meira birgur.
then was I(N) more fit
‘I was fitter then.’
In sum, the analytic comparatives and superlatives are quite common in
Modern Faroese (cf. the results from the corpora searches in Tables 10,
11) and they are also readily accepted by a number of speakers (cf. Table
12) . The type of the adjective does not seem to play any major role (inher-
ited, derived, loanword, compound). These analytic constructions were
generally found to be more acceptable than the analytic construction
DO+PP following verbs like geva ‘give’, for instance. This might suggest
that the analytic comparatives are older than the innovative DO+PP con-
struction.
4. A common denominator?
We can now ask the question whether the two changes under considera-
tion have a common denominator. The three main possibilities were
mentioned in (2) above, repeated here for convenience:
(2)a. internal changes
b. external changes, i.e. language contact
c. influence of extra-linguistic factors (e.g. age, gender, social class,
dialect, etc.)
As pointed out above, these possibilities are not necessarily mutually
exclusive.
A language change can be purely internally motivated and one could
easily claim that the changes under discussion here are exclusively lan-
guage internal changes. In this case, the changes are motivated by pre-
existing structures in Faroese and fit the language’s (innovational) pro-
clivities (it is drifting towards analyticity). That is: geva ‘give’ IO+DO
changes to geva DO+PP (cf. (ia,b)) because the preopositional construc-
tion exists in Faroese and the same could then be true of Icelandic where
a ditransitive verb like senda ‘send’ can also take a DO+PP complement
(cf. Höskuldur Thráinsson 2007:174). Faroese and Icelandic parallels are
given in (10) (cf. also the Icelandic examples in (4) above):