Íslenskt mál og almenn málfræði - 2020, Qupperneq 159

(95)A: Hvað kom fyrir? (Ice.)
what came for
‘What happened?’
B: Það festist rútan á leiðinni norður.
expl got.stuck bus.def on way.def north
‘The bus that goes north got stuck.’
This, we believe, is a presentational construction but it is contextually
restricted. (95) is only possible if it is common knowledge that only one
bus runs that way and the bus has not been mentioned in the context.
There are, however, more restrictions on this type than on other presen-
tational sentences in Icelandic. It is hardly used with transitive verbs and
it is degraded with IP-pivots. More research is clearly required on the
interaction between definiteness and pivothood in Icelandic.
6. Concluding remarks
In this article we have carried out a comparison of presentational sen-
tences in Icelandic and Swedish, looking in particular at the behaviour of
VP-pivots and IP-pivots. With reference to the argument structure pro-
posed in Platzack (2010) we have established that there are similar restric-
tions on roles and positions for VP-pivots in both languages. Only
Themes, Paths and Performers may appear as VP-pivots. A Theme pivot
may co-occur with other DPs, but only if it is the last DP argument in the
vP. We speculate that this restriction may reflect the information struc-
tural function of presentational sentences, namely to introduce a new,
often focussed, referent, but further investigations, including phonologi-
cal ones, are required. The thematic restrictions we have discussed also
motivate taking a fresh look at the mapping between thematic roles and
case marking in Icelandic, previously discussed in, for example, Zaenen
et al. (1985), Maling (2001), Jónsson (2003, 2005) and Sigurðsson (2012a,b).
IP-pivots are only generally available in Icelandic where they are the
preferred option for Agents, Experiencers, Goals and Performers with
agentive properties. One consequence of this is that we find presenta-
tional sentences in Icelandic which cannot be expressed as presentationals
in Swedish. Negated IP-pivots can be found in older Swedish and are still
possible which, we believe, is a consequence of the tendency for negated
object DPs to raise to IP, as shown in (63). An interesting finding is that
Thematic constraints on presentational sentences in Icelandic and Swedish 159