Íslenskt mál og almenn málfræði - 2020, Blaðsíða 301
was compromised in the history of Icelandic and that a Mainland Scandinavian-
like system was heavily stigmatised. In the 18th and 19th centuries, Icelandic was
taking on a guise that somewhat resembled Danish, though perhaps more akin
to Faroese, in terms of verb-adverb placement. Of course, it is impossible to
know how this would have played out had there been no normative pressure at
all and if Danish influences had persisted in Iceland, like they did in the Faroe
Islands to a much greater extent. It is probably true that there have not been
great normative pressures in Faroese to influence which one of the orders is the
norm, but Adv−Vfin is gradually winning over and V-to-T is in the process of
being lost. Since the influence of Danish is not as strong as in the Faroes,
Icelandic would probably lag behind, as it does in all other respects with regard
to (morpho)syntactic changes.
In Danish and Swedish, there is certainly some evidence that normative
pressures may have served to suppress the attested variation, especially the varia-
tion allowed within the spoken variation space (see e.g. Pettersson 1988, Greger -
sen and Pedersen 2000, Sandersen 2003, 2007, Håkansson 2011, Jensen 2011,
Jensen and Christensen 2013). Whether this bears any relevance to the V-in-situ
vs. V-to-T question is unclear. Sandersen (2003, 2007), for instance, suggests
that Vfin−Adv was widespread among non-professional writers, but that it was
disfavoured through formal schooling. However, based on her examples and
other evidence (see my dissertation p. 66), this seems to have applied mainly to
cases that were permitted by the V-to-C grammar anyway, such as declaratives
with verbs of saying and thinking, and typically not, for instance, in embedded
clauses with a restricted left periphery, such as restricted relative clauses.
heimildir — references
Abney, Steven Paul. 1987. The English Noun Phrase in its Sentential Aspect. Doktorsritgerð,
Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Allan, Robin, Philip Holmes og Tom Lundskær-Nielsen. 1995. Danish: A Comprehensive
Grammar. Routledge, London.
Anderwald, Lieselotte. 2014. Measuring the success of prescriptivism: Quantitative gram-
maticography, corpus linguistics and the progressive passive. English Language and
Linguistics 18(1):1–21.
Anton Karl Ingason. 2016. Realizing Morphemes in the Icelandic Noun Phrase. Doktors -
ritgerð, University of Pennsylvania.
Anton Karl Ingason, Julie Anne Legate og Charles Yang. 2013. The Evolutionary Trajec -
tory of the Icelandic New Passive. University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in
Linguistics 19(2):91–100.
Auer, Anita. 2009. The Subjunctive in the Age of Prescriptivism: English and German Develop -
ments during the Eighteenth Century. Palgrave Studies in Language History and
Language Change. Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke.
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