Íslenskt mál og almenn málfræði - 01.01.2023, Qupperneq 181

iris edda nowenstein
Project rationale and core ideas

The history of linguistics is filled with discoveries of generalizations and their
subsequent rejection when exceptions to them are found. In this dissertation,1 I
show that productive linguistic rules do not need to be exceptionless to be
acquired and therefore exist in speakers’ grammars. This is done through an in-
depth study of the acquisition of the Icelandic case marking system, which for
almost half a decade has on numerous occasions been the exception which breaks
the rule in formal case theory. Indeed, Icelandic is well known for its ‘quirky’
oblique subjects, nominative objects and robust semantically conditioned dative
productivity. These characteristics have made the language an important testing
ground for research on case and productivity, as well as the mapping between
form and meaning. I argue that many of the unsolved puzzles tied to the Icelandic
case marking system can be solved by shifting the viewpoint to its understudied
learnability, and that Icelandic case marking also provides valuable insights on
fundamental questions in language acquisition. In this context I focus on the
non-default dative in particular, and the project contributes to three distinct but
related topics in language acquisition research: (1) (Morpho)syntactic bootstrap-
ping, (2) Rule formation and productivity, and (3) Variation and change in acqui-
sition. It builds on experimental data from 148 children aged 2–13 as well as
incremental child language corpus analyses, and contains experimental work at
the level of the individual, group and child-caregiver dyad.
One of the many particularities of the Icelandic case marking system is the
language’s redundant marking of argument function (Kiparsky 1997) as well as
Íslenskt mál 45 (2023), 181–222. © 2023 Íslenska málfræðifélagið, Reykjavík.
1 This overview is based on the structure of the dissertation as well as its presentation
at the doctoral defense. A recording of the defense is available online at the following
address: <https://livestream.com/hi/doktorsvorniriseddanowenstein>. Extensive acknowl-
edgments can be found in the dissertation but I would like to use this opportunity to thank
my supervisor, Sigríður Sigurjónsdóttir, as well as the doctoral committee (Anton Karl
Ingason, Charles Yang and Joel Wallenberg) again for their invaluable support over the
years. I also want to thank the members of the external committee, Miriam Butt and
Misha Becker, for accepting to evaluate the thesis, participate in the defense and con-
tribute to this volume. I have benefited immensely from their insightful and constructive
remarks as well as their work, which I hope to engage more with in the future. The dis-
sertation is available online at <https://opinvisindi.is/handle/20.500.11815/4051> and forms
the basis of a book manuscript which is currently in preparation within the Cambridge
Studies in Linguistics series at Cambridge University Press.