Íslenskt mál og almenn málfræði - 01.01.2011, Page 173

Comments and Questions...
171
(6)a. ?Ég held að------hafi verið rætt um málið á fundinum. (p. 146, (2))
I think that has been discussed about matter-the at meeting-the
b. Ég held að rætt hafi verið_____um málið á fundinum.
I think that discussed has been about matter-the at meeting-the
‘I think the matter has been discussed at the meeting.’
In addition to the questionnaire data, the author presents the results of a corpus
investigation into the frequency of different types of SF-fronted constituents.
Adverbs are most commonly fronted in all clause types except relative clauses,
where instead past participles more likely to be fronted (see table 5, p. 157). The
corpus investigation also revealed that for many expressions, SF is not just a styl-
istic option — despite its English name — but the unmarked order, and in some
cases, actually the only possible order. Some examples are given in (7)—(8):
(7)a. þegar grannt er skoðað (p. 158, (48))
when carefully is looked at
b. ?*þegar (það) er skoðað grannt
when (there) is looked at carefully
(8)a. þegar fram i sækir (p. 158, (49))
when forth to advances
b. *þegar (það) sækir fram í
when (there) advances forth to
‘as time goes on’
Question 5: Could it be the case that these ‘obligatory’ SF-expressions in some
sense act as triggers for the use of SF? To what extent are they used in children’s
literature and school books? If they are not very frequent in children’s literature,
could this explain the inter-age variation found in the questionnaires?
In chapter 6 Asgrímur discusses the relations between the investigated struc-
tures and concludes that it is not sufficient to refer exclusively to the morpho-
syntactic properties of the structures such as the presence or absence of agree-
ment features. Instead the differences in acceptability of e.g verb adverb order in
subordinate clauses, Embedded Topicalization and Stylistic Fronting must be
explained in terms of semantic/pragmatic differences amongst the various types
embedded clauses, differences which are to be located in the internal structure of
the CP. In chapter 7 the author puts forward a detailed analysis of the CP-
domain, using features like [+/- assertive] and [+/- factive], see e.g. the struc-
tures on p. 216 f.
Question 6: What kind of feature is [+/- assertive]? How is it checked? In what
way is it visible to the embedding verb?