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the surprisingly robust and productive non-default dative, appearing both in
object and subject case (e.g. Andrews 1976, Thráinsson 1979, Svavarsdóttir 1982,
Barðdal 1993, 1999, 2001 and 2008, Maling 2002 and Jónsson and Eythórsson
2005). The productivity of the Icelandic dative does appear in typologically ex -
pected semantic contexts, namely with experiencer and recipient arguments, but
also with e.g. themes of motion verbs (e.g. Barðdal 1993, 1999, 2001 and 2008,
Maling 2002 and Jónsson 1996 and 2003). Despite these well-known associations
between morphological dative case and specific semantics, the relationship be -
tween case and meaning in Icelandic is still a matter of debate. Although various
patterns have been identified (agents are always nominative, patients are typically
accusative and indirect objects (recipients) most frequently dative), linguists have
pointed out that the correlations are not exact and exceptions can be found (e.g.
Maling 2002, Thráinsson 2007, Sigurðsson 2012 and Wood 2015). Conflicting
views can therefore be discerned in previous work: Case productivity is assumed
to be semantically conditioned while the relationship between case and meaning
is rejected on the basis of being too approximative. But do patterns (rules of lan-
guage) always have to be absolute and without exceptions? And can exceptions
play a significant role in learning?
In the thesis I argue that from the standpoint of language acquisition, which
has been lacking in research on Icelandic case marking, rules do not need to be
exceptionless to be discovered by children and thus become part of the grammar.
If the distributional evidence for case-semantics associations is present in chil-
dren’s language environment, they will learn these patterns as long as the number
of exceptions is tolerable (Yang 2016). This finding, that a rule can be productive
despite having exceptions, has been demonstrated multiple times in work on lan-
guage acquisition without being integrated into broader linguistic argumenta-
tion. In the current work, this hypothesis is supported by the results of the stud-
ies reported on. Broadly, the results show that children associate the dative more
with experiencers, recipients and motion themes in comparison to other thematic
roles, despite known exceptions. The association between the dative and applied
arguments (experiencers and recipients) is formed earlier than the association
with themes of motion verbs. The corpus analysis furthermore shows that these
mappings of form and meaning can be derived from the distributional properties
of the input, which can also predict the well-studied patterns of dative productiv-
ity and case marking variation in Icelandic. I argue that the learnability perspec-
tive is crucial to the understanding of language variation and change, as well as
providing valuable insights into theo retical approaches to case.
However, the main contributions of the thesis lie in the field of language
acquisition. First, I argue that the Icelandic data provide additional support for
the claim that children can rely on language-specific, morphological cues to derive
verb meaning (Göksun et al. 2008, Matsuo et al. 2012, Trueswell et al. 2012 and
Leischner et al. 2016). The results show that children acquiring Icelandic can,
early on, use case to determine verb meaning when word order is uninformative.
Iris Edda Nowenstein182