Íslenskt mál og almenn málfræði - 2020, Síða 299

also suggested by the fact that SF in relative clauses is often “mistaken” for the
Adv−Vfin variant in Icelandic. Whether or not the adaption of Adv−Vfin that I
assume could also have happened in the absence of the targeted change is impos-
sible to say but it is probably not a coincidence that it occurred while Adv−Vfin
was on the rise contemporaneously with changes in (1) and (2) above. This is
thus a potential answer to the question why Adv−Vfin with its modern proper-
ties did not arise earlier.
Question 5: I suspect that the “focus” on declaratives versus relatives mainly
stems from the fact that Figure 3.15 was originally drawn without interrogative
and adverbial clauses. These basic clause types were added later for the sake of
completeness but were subsequently not discussed at length in the text. What
Figure 3.15 was supposed to show is that the use of Adv−Vfin is becoming
increasingly Modern Icelandic-like towards the turn of the 19th century: the rate
is dropping in declaratives (rare in Modern Icelandic) and appears more or less
stable around the 25% mark in relatives. The other types are in between, though
closer to the declaratives. It is true that the adverbial and relative clauses show a
similar pattern, but this is partly also true of Modern Icelandic. The adverbial
clauses are a mixed bag, of course, some permitting topicalisation whereas oth-
ers do not. (The same can, in principle, apply to the relative as well, but probably
much less so.)
I do find it striking how similar adverbial and relative clauses are in terms of
the pattern, although the frequency is consistently lower with Adv, as is to be
expected. The main point was that it seems that Adv−Vfin is somehow stabilis-
ing in the relatives, but dropping in the other contexts (adverbials again exhibit-
ing a partly different pattern due to mixed properties). I would have expected
interrogatives to pattern closer to the relatives, since they typically should have a
restricted left periphery. However, interrogatives are also rarer than the other
types, which could explain why they are different in my data.
Question 6: My point was actually the opposite. There is evidence from declara-
tives that there were grammars where the assertion feature appears to be rele-
vant. This system is very different from the more Modern Icelandic-like system
where Adv−Vfin is not often found in declaratives in the first place. On the one
hand, there are these assertion-based systems, reminiscent of Mainland Scandi -
navian, sometimes with a very high frequency of the Adv−Vfin variant, while on
the other hand there are these other systems that also allow Adv−Vfin but
where this variant is mainly confined to or most frequently occurs in relative
clauses.
In other words, it is not only that there is not a sharp difference between
asserted vs. non-asserted contexts; this latter type of grammar also features
Adv−Vfin at a very low rate in declaratives, regardless of the assertion distinc-
Replies to Caroline Heycock’s questions 299