Rit (Vísindafélag Íslendinga) - 01.06.1970, Page 390

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more difficult. OI skera, for instance, governs the accusative
only. But its objects are of different kinds and, accordingly,
the verb appears in various meanings. Let me mention just
three examples: (a) skera hár ‘cut hair’, (b) skera akr ‘reap a
field’, (c) skera þingboð ‘carve out an assembly-dispatch’.
Originally this variety may have been brought about by
different forms of the verb. Vonhof (1905:45) assumed that
the meaning of (a), ‘zerschneiden’, was to be assigned to PN
*ga-skeran. In (b) PN *bi-skeran might be the original verb,
as hinted at by Modéer (1943:60 and 62). And in (c), finally,
we might have the simplex itself (cf. Modéer 1943:70).
However this may be in detail, these suggestions are suffi-
ciently well supported by comparative evidence to make clear
that a verb should not a priori be disregarded on the assump-
tion that it occurs solely with accusative object in kernel
sentences. Some kind of subclassification of such verbs or such
objects seems to be desirable, and, of course, it is neither
unknown in traditional syntax nor useless in a study like this.
But more exact and more sophisticated methods would be
welcome.
Finally, I will take one example to show how important it
is to consider the syntactic construction of the verb phrase as
a whole, not only transitivity vs. intransitivity or the case
government in a narrow sense.
The strong verb bera is used in a number of ways as can be
seen, for example, in Fritzner’s dictionary (1886-96.1.125—
130). It is no easy matter to account for all these various usages
and meanings and no one has classified them exhaustively
according to syntactic criteria. In what follows I have to
confine myself to three principal constructions: (1) bera e-t/e-n,
(2) bera e-m e-t/e-n, and (3) bera e-tje-n e-u.
In the first of these constructions two meanings of the verb
can be distinguished: (a) ‘carry, bear’, (b) ‘give birth to,
calve’. The first of these meanings belonged to the simplex
PN *beran, the second to the compound PN *ga-beran with
the perfectivizing particle *ga-, cf. Goth. ga-bairan, OE ge-