Íslenskt mál og almenn málfræði - 2020, Page 295

“from above”, not just a change that rises to awareness. It is a change “from
below” presumably for the majority of speakers, where it is an extension of an
earlier pattern that initially permitted only subjects of a particular kind. There is
furthermore change “from above” where the Adv−Vfin phenomenon increases
in frequency and takes on distributional properties familiar from Danish. The
idea is then that there was a new target norm, largely but not wholly confined to
the higher circles.
For educated intellectuals and their associates we can assume elevated levels
of Danish contact that according to a contact-borrowing scale such as Thomason
(2001) may lead to shifts in the frequency of patterns and even for new patterns
to emerge in syntax. It is not clear to me to what extent this targeted change is to
be regarded as “conscious”, which is what the Labovian “change from above” is
mostly about after all. The puristic movement turned the tide on this trend
around and after 1840, which is where the stigma comes from. Now the ruling
class/prestige norm had become something that needed to be suppressed.
However, Adv−Vfin at a very low frequency could also have been targeted by
purists and this would just as well have elevated it to the ‘above’. There isn’t nec-
essarily a previous state where there is a clear prestige norm which is then reject-
ed; the sort of Adv−Vfin that we find in Old Icelandic sources, if we would
place that situation in the latter half of the 19th century, would most certainly
also have been considered Danish and rejected as such.
Question 2: The basis of this argument is first and foremost the comparison
across genres, especially the rate of Adv−Vfin in the newspapers relative to what
we see in the letters, rather than the marginal presence of Adv−Vfin in isola-
tion. The argument is roughly the following: It is sometimes suggested that
Adv−Vfin is a contrived feature of educated intellectuals, and perhaps mostly
those who went abroad to study. The findings of Þorbjörg Hróarsdóttir (1998)
already cast some doubt on that assumption and my findings also suggest
Adv−Vfin was certainly more widespread than this view entails. The private let-
ters show that the feature is used colloquially and this might be taken to suggest
that it was a part of speakers’ casual code (albeit to differing degrees). Even if we
look at groups of speakers who do not use Adv−Vfin very frequently, such as
peasants/labourers, we still arrive at approximately 10% for the private letters
during the latter half/last quarter of the century. From this we can assume or
extrapolate that Adv−Vfin was to some extent a “normal” and not a contrived
feature of Icelandic and that it has some “expected” frequency, perhaps because it
serves some function (cf. Ásgrímur Angantýsson 2011).
The frequency of Adv−Vfin in the newspapers is often high above what we
find in these more Adv−Vfin hostile groups. However, towards and beyond the
end of the 19th century, the proportion of Adv−Vfin drops even below the val-
ues we find in these private letters. We can use the fact that the newspapers
Replies to Caroline Heycock’s questions 295