Íslenskt mál og almenn málfræði - 13.07.1981, Page 45

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The case government of the Faroese preposition fyri
which had no written form to speak of until the mid-nineteenth century
and which has been subject to varying degrees of Danish influence since
the Reformation, Danish having been the only official language of the
islands until as late as the 1940s.
My corpus consists of thirty-eight texts of on average 6000 words
each taken from sources as diverse as newspapers and magazines,
scientific publications, collections of poetry, novels and short stories,
private correspondence and unscripted conversation, and spanning the
period c. 1890 to the present day.2 In addition I have over the past six
years noted down sentences containing fyri that seemed to me of parti-
cular interest, wherever I have seen or heard them. Long before I began
to analyse my examples in detail, I became aware of certain basic
pattems which seemed continually to recur (fyri with verbs and adverbs
of motion -1- acc., with the locational sense ‘in front of’ + dat., with
the meaning ‘in return for’ or ‘in place of’ + acc., in phrases express-
ing the idea of hindrance or limitation + dat., and so on), and the
consciousness of such pattems led me to pay particular attention to any
examples that in some way or other confirmed or cast doubt on my
assumptions. Many of my original notions have had to be drastically
revised, and I am well aware that what follows is not a definitive ana-
lysis of the material, but simply one possible way of trying to make
sense of it.
2. Fyri followed by the nominative
As far as I am aware, fyri is the only three-case preposition in Faro-
ese. Neither Lockwood (1955) nor Jacobsen and Matras (1961) mention
the fact that it can be followed by the nominative as well as the accusa-
tive and dative. This occurs in sentences where the interrogative hvat
functioning as a subject complement is modified by fyri. Eg:
(1) Hvat er hatta fyri pakki?
(2) so spyr Jógvan, hvat hettar er fyri ein smádrongur, ið tey fagna
so í dag
2 I do not intend to provide references for the examples I quote since this
would be an unnecessary encumbrance in a brief article that does not aim at ex-
haustive treatment of the material. The texts I use, however, are the same as those
that form the basis of a study I hope to publish in the near future on the syntax,
semantics and morphological case government of við. In that study a complete list
of the texts will be provided with full bibliographical references.