Íslenskt mál og almenn málfræði - 01.01.2011, Page 169

ELISABET ENGDAHL
Comments and Questions
at Asgrímur Angantýsson’s Doctoral Defence
Summary
This dissertation represents a successful combination of theoretical exploration
and thorough empirical work.3 The author has investigated four constructions
where modern Icelandic differs from the mainland Scandinavian languages and, as
is shown in the dissertation, also to some extent from modern Faroese. The rele-
vant constructions involve the order of sentential adverbs and the finite verb in
various kinds of subordinate clauses, Topicalization in embedded clauses, Stylistic
Fronting + Expletive Insertion and the so called Transitive Expletive Con-
struction. Each of these has received attention from linguists in recent years, but
so far no one has looked in detail at possible correlations between the acceptabil-
ity judgments for all of these constructions. In addition to providing a careful and
motivated syntactic analysis of the constructions, the author has consulted judg-
ment data from approximately 1600 Icelandic speakers of various ages and com-
pared these with judgments from speakers in the Faroe Islands, in Western
Jutland and in Álvdalen in north Dalecarlia, where he has carried out fieldwork
within the ScanDiaSyn project.4 In some cases he has supplemented the ques-
tionnaire data with corpus studies. The result is a comprehensive overview of the
actual use of these constructions in Modern Icelandic, together with a balanced
assessment of the various clause type structures that are relevant for the
Scandinavian languages.
The thesis consists of eight chapters and six appendices, a total of 270 pages.
After the Introduction (chapter 1), an overview of the theoretical issues and pre-
vious research is provided in chapter 2. Ásgrímur here discusses the two main the-
oretical approaches, the morpho-syntactic approach according to which differ-
ences in the morphology lead to different structures (cf. Holmberg and Platzack
1995 and much later work), and the so called cartographic approach according to
3 The following is a digest of the comments I made and the questions I raised at the
oral defence on March 5, 2011.1 refer to the candidate by first name, as I did at the defence,
since Icelanders use the patronymic system and hence typically do not have a last name and
Asgrímur would never be referred to as Mr. Angantýsson in Iceland. — A more compre-
hensive overview of the content and structure of the thesis can be found in Engdahl 2012.
4 http://www.tekstlab.uio.no/nota/scandiasyn. Additional results from the Icelandic
Syntax project will appear in Thráinsson, Angantýsson and Sigurðsson (eds., forthcoming).
Islemkt máltf (2011), 167-173. © 2011 íslenska málfmðifélagið, ReykjavíL