Íslenskt mál og almenn málfræði - 01.01.2022, Page 112

rate it). Icelandic has quite a rich verb agreement, usually with five distinct verb endings,
and the verb agreement has not weakened in the history of the language, raising the ques-
tion why referential null subjects should have disappeared. In fact, it is unclear if they ever
disappeared completely. Referential null subjects do occur in the modern language. They
are uncommon, but they can be found in corpora (The Icelandic Gigaword Corpus and
Tímarit.is). In a search made for the purposes of this article many hundreds of sentences
with referential null subjects in the 1st and 2nd person were found in the corpora (it is
pointless to search for null subjects in the 3rd person; all such examples that were checked
had either impersonal null subjects or postponed subjects). That is just a tiny fraction of
all sentences with referential 1st and 2nd person subjects (0–0.58%, depending on verbs).
However, it is a striking fact that the vast majority (86%) of the examples found are in the
1st person plural. The verbal ending in the 1st person plural (-um) is the clearest
person/number ending in Icelandic verbal paradigms, so this cannot be a coincidence. A
small informant survey (304 participants) also showed that up to nearly 40% of the partic-
ipants accepted some referential null-subject sentences, which is another unexpected and
striking fact. There are indications that the new null subjects are unrelated to null subjects
in older Icelandic, which would be interesting indeed. However, an alternative interpreta-
tion would be that referential null subjects never completely disappeared from the lan-
guage. Hopefully, future research will throw brighter light on this issue by showing
whether or not referential null subjects are on the increase in Icelandic.

Halldór Ármann Sigurðsson
SOL, Språk- och litteraturcentrum
Lunds universitet
Helgonabacken 12
223 62 Lund
SVERIGE
halldor.sigurdsson@nordlund.lu.se
Halldór Ármann Sigurðsson112