Íslenskt mál og almenn málfræði - 2020, Page 288

a user of the language. And the relative infrequency of syntactic phenomena
(compared, for example, to the occurrence of particular phonemes) may be one
reason behind the observation that syntactic variables do not readily lend them-
selves to the signalling of group membership. This observation has been made in
various ways by the famed linguist William Labov, and is cited in this disserta-
tion as his Interface Principle:
Abstract linguistic structure has little or no social impact on members of the
community. The interface of language and society is narrow, and primarily
on the surface: the words and sounds of the language. (Labov and Harris
1986:21)
As Heimir notes, an even stronger and sharper version of this claim has been
formulated more recently in Anton Karl Ingason et al. (2013:93):
Word order is not socially evaluated, unless it can be identified with specific
phonological or lexical material.
These claims however have not gone unchallenged. Much of the work investi-
gating the validity of the idea that syntax does not carry social meaning in the
same way that e.g. phonology may has been carried out in synchronic investiga-
tions. It is an original and valuable contribution of this dissertation that it
attempts to probe the same question from a diachronic perspective. And beyond
the question of whether syntactic variables can carry social meaning: can these
variables be consciously manipulated in a way that affects the trajectory of
change?
2. Questions concerning changes in verb-adverb placement
The biggest overlap between Heimir’s research and my own lies in the change
that he discusses in the relative order of the finite verb (Vfin) and sentence-
medial adverbs (Adv), including negation. For this reason, my questions
focussed on this topic, discussed at length in Chapter 3 of the dissertation.
This topic has been researched quite intensively as a matter of synchronic
variation between Icelandic, on the one hand, and (Standard) Danish, Nor -
wegian, Swedish on the other, as exemplified by the following examples:
(1) Voldemort hade krafter som jag aldrig kommer at ha. (Swedish)
Voldemort had powers that I never come to have
‘Voldemort had powers that I will never have.’
(2) Voldemort býr yfir mætti sem ég mun aldrei öðlast. (Icelandic)
We know from the historical record and the work of researchers such as Falk
(1993) and Sundquist (2002, 2003) among many others, that Swedish and Danish
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