Rit (Vísindafélag Íslendinga) - 01.06.1970, Page 566

564
way, but may assume that a series of semantic changes has
resulted in a syntactic reanalysis of various kinds for the
different cases.
Much more interesting, and probably more rewarding,
problems arise in the case of such dative subject verbs as
occur in the sentences Mér skilst að hann sé kominn ‘I understand
him to have come’, Mér láðist að skila bókimi ‘I failed to return
the book’, or even such forms as Mér geðjast..., Mér þóknast...
‘I am pleased by...’. The underlying structures of these verbs
are apparently in some general way related to such underlying
structures as (1 od), but the exact formulation of these problems
is beyond the scope of this paper. It is certainly possible that
the analysis of these verb forms can only be satisfactorily
accounted for within the framework of case relation analysis
in general. Thus, a related problem would be the occurrence
of such ‘irregular’ or sub-regular verbs as dreyma ‘dream’,
langa ‘long’, or minna ‘recall’, which are always preceded by
an accusative NP in the surface structure, mig minnir, langar,
dreymir, etc. (For an attempt to account for the underlying
structures, in English, of verbs that in Icelandic always have
an accusative subject, cf. Fillmore 1968:85-86.)
4. At this point we may return to the original question
and ask whether we can define any general syntactic process
that serves as the underlying common denominator for the
category of voice. In part, we can accept Fillmore’s sugge-
stion that this is a process of topicalization, or of the ordering of
NP’s in the surface structure, where the ‘normal’ or active
form of NP—VP relationships orders the AgNP first in the
surface structure. In extending our research to comprise the
middle as well as the active and passive voices it would appear
that we are dealing, not only with topicalization, but also with
the more general processes of NP deletion, i.e., not just of the
unspecified AgNP, but also of redundantly specifiable NP’s,
whether they are Agent or Object NP’s, as in the case of the
reciprocal or reflexive use of the -st formative.