Íslenskt mál og almenn málfræði - 01.01.2023, Síða 184

Dative/oblique subjects are usually experiencers. They are relatively rare, with
Barðdal’s (2001) corpus study showing that 93–94% subject tokens are nomina-
tive. Dative objects are more frequent and often refer to goals (e.g hjálpa ‘help’
and fá sér ‘get oneself’) and motion verb themes (e.g. ýta ‘push’) but can also be
patients (e.g. slátra ‘slaughter’). In Barðdal’s (2001) study, 69.4% of object tokens
are accusative, 25% dative, 3% nominative and 2.6% genitive. From a learnability
standpoint, these general but mostly non-deterministic patterns which are avail-
able in the input could provide a starting point for the distributional acquisition
of case marking. Additionally, the abundance of non-default (dative) forms in the
Icelandic case marking system provides an interesting test case for various
approaches to abstraction, rule formation, productivity and overgeneralizations
in acquisition (such as Pinker 1999, O’Donnell 2015, Yang 2016, Blything et al.
2018, Ambridge et al. 2018, Goldberg 2019, Ambridge 2020, Schuler et al. 2020),
topics which have very much been dominated by research on the acquisition of
English. A contrast from a related, morphologically rich language with relatively
rigid word order and robust non-default patterns in case marking, Icelandic,
could therefore provide valuable testing grounds. The semantic dimension to the
case marking arguably makes the contrast more complex and interesting.
The examples in (1)–(3) illustrate this semantic dimension to case marking in
Icelandic quite well, as they all include predicates in which case alternations are
possible, creating minimal pairs where word order is uninformative and the
semantic characteristics of the dative become clear. Barðdal (2011a) observes that
this could be considered to be remnant differential object marking (where dative
is used to mark e.g. animacy).
(1)a. Stelpan skaut boltann/boltanum.2
girl.the.nom shot ball.the.acc/dat
‘The girl shot the ball.’
b. Þau sópuðu allt/öllu.
they.nom swept all.acc/dat
‘They swept it all.’
(2)a. Ég klóraði hann/honum.
I.nom scratched him.acc/dat
‘I scratched him.’
b. Hann þvoði það/því.
he.nom washed it.acc/dat
‘He washed it.’
(3)a. Hún/henni gengur vel.
she.nom/dat goes/does well.
‘She is doing well/it is going well.’
Iris Edda Nowenstein184
2 The examples were created by the author but parallel examples can be found in
Barðdal (1993), Maling (2001) and Thráinsson (2007).