Íslenskt mál og almenn málfræði - 01.01.2011, Page 172

170 Elisabet Engdahl
(4) a. og sagði sáttfús aðsvonajakka hefði Davy Crockett átt. (p. 123, (26))
and said conciliatory that such coat had Davy Crockett owned
‘and said in a conciliatory manner that David Crockett had owned such a coat.’
b. Guð veit að það geri ég líka.
God knows that that do I too
‘God knows that I’ll also do that.’
c. þeir vissu þó vel að þetta máttu þeir ekki.
they knew though well that this were allowed they not
‘they were fully aware that they were not allowed to do this’
Although some of the attested examples contain topicalized lexical NPs such as
svona jakka in (4a) with a demonstrative determiner, it is noticeable that most of
the examples involve simple personal or demonstrative pronouns, as in (4b,c).
The same holds for topicalized phrases in main clauses, the author establishes (p.
125), based on examples from IS-TAL:
(5) a. það átti ég nú líka (p. 125, (3i)-(32))
that owned I now too
‘I owned that as well’
b. það veit ég ekki
that know I not
‘I don’t know’
c. þessa tókstu bara svona
this one took(2sg) just like that
‘you took this one just like that’
d. þetta vissi ég
this knew I
‘I knew that’
Ásgrímur comments that examples like (5b,d) “are fixed phrases and are very com-
mon in spoken language” (p.126). (5a,c) have similar structures and are clearly
formed productively in a context; note the use of deictic elements.
Question 4: What does it mean to say that these are fixed phrases? Are they not
instances of a productive syntactic pattern? Did you consider using this type of
examples in your questionnaire, maybe providing a short dialogue as a context?
In the investigation of Stylistic Fronting (SF), Ásgrímur establishes that both
the type of the ‘SF-candidate’ and the clause type affect the acceptability judg-
ments and that consequently the acceptability hierarchy proposed in Maling
(1980) needs to be modified. For both old and young speakers, SF is preferred
over a subject gap, as shown in (6).