Íslenskt mál og almenn málfræði - 2014, Síða 53

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summary
‘On stylistic fronting and related constructions in Icelandic and Faroese’
Keywords: stylistic fronting, expletive insertion, verb-first, embedded clauses
This paper reports on the similarities and differences between Stylistic Fronting (SF) and
related constructions in Icelandic and Faroese. Contrary to the claim that “any category
can become an expletive” (Holmberg 2000), it is shown that stylistically fronted elements
and overt expletives are not equivalent. In both languages, expletive insertion is preferred
over SF in complement clauses, but in Faroese, unlike in Icelandic, expletive insertion is
preferred over SF in adverbial clauses and relative clauses as well. In most cases, fronting
past participles is easy in Faroese (at least in relative clauses), as it is in Icelandic, but
fronting verbal particles and prepositions seems to be heavily restricted in Faroese, unlike
in Icelandic.
Another finding is that many instances of SF found in Icelandic corpora are in fact
fixed idioms where the expected unmarked variant is doubtful or ungrammatical. The
Icelandic production data also show that past participles are the most commonly fronted
elements in Icelandic relative clauses, but adverbs are the most commonly fronted ele-
ments in complement clauses. Younger speakers of Icelandic do not like embedded SF as
much as older speakers do. This could be interpreted as an ongoing change in the language.
However, it must be taken into account that these constructions are more common in
written language and in a formal style of speech; thus the older informants are perhaps
more likely to accept features of ‘elevated’ style, even though they are being asked for judg-
ments about their own usage in the spoken language. Data from interviews confirm that
people consider these constructions formal and ‘sophisticated’. The overall data presented
and discussed here suggest that the possibility of SF is partly conditioned by the clause
type and the nature of the element fronted by SF and partly by lexical/idio matic factors.
Ásgrímur Angantýsson
Menntavísindasviði
Háskóla Íslands
IS-105 Reykjavík, ÍSLAND
asgriman@hi.is
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