Íslenskt mál og almenn málfræði - 01.01.2011, Page 160

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Asgrímur Angantýsson
Another reason for investigating these constructions with respect to one another
is to determine whether there are any indications for structural or parametric
interrelations as sometimes suggested in the literature (e.g. Holmberg and Plat-
zack 1995). The third reason is that it is important to explore the interaction
between SF and Expletive Insertion, i.e. the similarities and differences between
the distribution of these phenomena in different types of embedded clauses with-
out a pre-verbal subject, and to discover the extent to which it is possible to leave
the subject position empty. Finally, my discussion is aimed at drawing attention
to the fact that the acceptability of all of these word order phenomena depends to
some extent on the type of embedded clause.
In the current syntactic literature, there is a strong consensus on the major
word order differences between the modern Germanic languages from a descrip-
tive and empirical point of view, i.e. the syntactic “macro-variation” within the
language family. Accordingly, more fine-grained word order variation among
closely related languages and dialects has been emerging as a major topic in the
field, i.e. syntactic “micro-variation”. As one can imagine, linguists’ claims about
the acceptability of constructions of the micro-syntactic type tend to be conflict-
ing. Therefore, it is of particular descriptive and empirical importance to collect
judgments of such phenomena and to search for examples in spontaneous speech
and production data. Although the main task of generative linguistics is to deal
with competence rather than performance, the only access to linguistic knowledge
is through language use and grammaticality judgments or, more accurately,
“acceptability reactions”. In my view, critical use of quantificational data in gen-
erative syntax is not only compatible with the study of individual grammars but
essential with respect to syntactic variation.
Most of the Icelandic data presented in my thesis was collected in connection
with the third and last overview project of IceDiaSyn in 2007.2 I also searched for
the relevant examples in three corpora of tagged material (approximately one mil-
lion word tokens). The non-Icelandic data was collected in Álvdalen (two ques-
tionnaires, 2007 and 2008), Western-Jutland (one questionnaire, 2008) and the
Faroe Islands (one questionnaire, 2008). The total number of Icelandic speakers
in the pilot project and the IceDiaSyn project in 2005—2007 was about 2,430 and
I use data from about 1.600 of those speakers in my thesis. The total number of
my own non-Icelandic informants was 124.
The Icelandic participants were evenly distributed with respect to age, gender
and social backgound. They were divided into four age-groups: Adolecents (age
2 “Icelandic Dialect Syntax” (or “Syntactic Variation in Icelandic”), a research project
supported by Grant of Excellence from the Icelandic Research Fund (2005-2007), princi-
pal investigator Höskuldur Thráinsson. The project was connected to similar projects in
other Nordic countries through the research networks “Scandinavian Dialect Syntax”
(ScanDiaSyn, cf. http://uit.no/scandiasyn) and “Nordic Center of Excellence in Micro-
comparative Syntax” (NORMS, cf. http://norms.uit.no/).