Íslenskt mál og almenn málfræði - 01.01.2023, Page 103

struction began to appear in the 18th century (13a) and gained ground in
the 19th century (cf. ROH, as in (13b)). In earlier texts, we can find the
variant without the conjunction að, as in (13a), while að is not omitted in
Modern Icelandic (13b, c). ROH contains no examples followed by an
infinitive phrase, but MÍM has many examples of this type (13d). In
MÍM, the construction án þess að (including both (13c) and (13d) types)
is very frequent, accounting for more than 40 percent of all the examples
(5,359 out of 12,453).
Now, if the selection of án with the dative discussed above was a pure
substitution of the genitive by the dative, the construction *án því (að), as
the archaic dative counterpart of án þess (að), might also be expected to
occur in the texts written in an archaic style. However, this study found
no such examples. This is likely because the expression án þess (að) does
not appear in Old Icelandic manuscripts, so there would not have been
any model for a change to *án því (að).

6. Conclusion
This study explored two questions concerning the case government of
the preposition án in Icelandic. The first question is whether there was a
difference in the usage of the different prepositional cases of án. This
study concludes that the difference in case government of án can be
attributed to a dialectal difference between Old Icelandic and Old Nor -
wegian. Old Icelandic án occurred most frequently with the dative, but
hardly ever with the genitive. Conversely, the genitive was the most fre-
quent case in Old Norwegian manuscripts, followed by the accusative.
The data seem to indicate that the primary prepositional case of án was
the dative in Old Icelandic and the genitive in Old Norwegian, while the
accusative was often used in homilies/didactic and translated texts.
The second question has to do with when án began to be used with
the genitive in Icelandic. One of the earliest possible genitive examples is
from around 1300; thereafter, the genitive occasionally appears in Ice -
landic manuscripts. This study showed that án was used with the geni-
tive, especially in Old Icelandic manuscripts related to Norway (such as
AM 657 a-b 4to and Holm. perg. 3 fol.), and it was assumed that the first
steps in the change reflected the influence of Norwegianisms. This ten-
dency changed in the 16th century. In Oddur Gottskálkssonʼs 1540 New
Testament translation, án was most frequently used with the genitive,
and the 1584 Guðbrandsbiblía showed a similar tendency. This study
Case government of the Icelandic preposition án 103