Íslenskt mál og almenn málfræði - 01.01.2011, Page 167

The Topic ofthe Thesis and an Overview ofMethods and Results 165
ed) in all types of embedded clauses in Icelandic which is not correct as I have
shown.
From a historical point of view one can assume that, in its “initial” stage,
Faroese had unambiguous morphological and syntactic evidence for a split IP,
resulting in “generalized V-to-I movement” (the same situation as in Modern
Icelandic). Then the language lost the relevant inflectional distinctions (indepen-
dent tense and agreement morphology) and at least some of the remaining syn-
tactic evidence for a split IP became ambiguous, for instance verb placement in
subject-initial embedded clauses without sentence adverbs and SF of sentence
adverbs. Under these circumstances, the subject-initial V2 order started to result
in certain semantic or pragmatic interpretations/effects, i.e. to express that the
proposition of the embedded clause is the main assertion (cf. the situation in the
Mainland Scandinavian languages).
In Modern Övdalian, morphological evidence for a split IP is not unambigu-
ous and verb movement in embedded clauses is on its way out. This is similar to
the situation in Faroese, but unlike in Faroese (and Icelandic), SF and TECs are
heavily degraded in Övdalian. In terms of the Rich Morphology Hypothesis,
weak version (RMHw, where there is only one way correlation between rich
morphology and its syntactic correlates, e.g. rich morphology -> split IP but not
necessarily vice versa) it is to be expected under such circumstances that verb
movement in embedded clauses is on its way out. Regarding subject-initial and
topic-initial V2 in complement clauses in Övdalian, it seems that the acceptabili-
ty of these word order phenomena depend, at least partially, on the semantic/
pragmatic properties of the matrix predicate and the embedded CP. Embedded
Topicalization obeys restrictions in Övdalian that are similar to those in the other
Scandinavian languages, which is consistent with this assumption. It is not obvi-
ous, however, why Övdalian differs from Danish in allowing the Vfin-Adv order
much more freely in indirect questions.
The fact that younger speakers of Icelandic do not like ET and SF as much as
older speakers could be interpreted as an ongoing change in Icelandic. However,
it must be taken into account that these constructions are more common in the
written language and in a formal style of speech, and that perhaps the older infor-
mants are more likely to accept more ‘ceremonious’ language use, even though
they are asked to give judgments about what they themselves use in spoken lan-
guage. The data from the interviews and students’ essays actually confirms that
people consider these constructions formal and ‘sophisticated’. If the results
regarding subject-initial V3 in Icelandic are taken to indicate an ‘ongoing change’,
then there are two changes that must be recognized: In relative clauses the condi-
tions for V3 are reminiscent of the conditions for Topicalization and SF (less
accepted by younger people), while in complement-clauses V3 is more accepted
by younger people than older (i.e. here it is an innovation). It is also interesting
that the younger speakers are in general less willing than the older speakers to