Íslenskt mál og almenn málfræði - 01.01.2021, Qupperneq 68

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summary
‘Historical word order changes in double object constructions in Icelandic’
Keywords:  ditransitive constructions, double object verbs, word order, treebank, histori-
cal syntax
This article focuses on historical changes in ditransitive (‘double object’) constructions in
Icelandic. Using the Icelandic Parsed Historical Corpus (IcePaHC), it is shown how the
order do-io (=Object Inversion) gradually becomes less and less common over time in
favour of io-do. This reduction in word order flexibility neither follows from morpholog-
ical deflection processes nor is there evidence that the do-io order was replaced by other
strategies such as prepositional ditransitive constructions of the type do-pio. As a result of
this change, word order in Icelandic ditransitives such as with give-type verbs has thus
become relatively rigid — arguably even more so than in related languages such as English
and Mainland Scandinavian given that Icelandic has not witnessed the (concomitant)
increase in prepositional ditransitive constructions. Quantitative corpus data drawn from
IcePaHC are presented using traditional descriptive methods and subsequently analysed
by means of mixed-effects modelling, incorporating various effects such as animacy, defi-
niteness and weight. A number of potential explanations are briefly discussed based on
existing proposals in the literature, focusing on morphological factors and information
structure. Interestingly, the study strongly suggests that word order changes in the context
of ditransitives preceded the loss of OV word order. The potential role in this develop-
ment of the emerging definite article (cf. Heimir F. Viðarsson 2017a, to appear) as well as
external factors such as language contact is discussed and subsequently linked to Inertial
Theory (e.g. Longobardi 2001, Keenan 2002). Inertia in the context of syntactic change is
Heimir F. Viðarsson68