Íslenskt mál og almenn málfræði - 01.01.2023, Qupperneq 202

miriam butt
Icelandic datives: A view from South Asia

This thesis by Iris Edda Nowenstein, Building yourself a variable case system: The
acquisition of Icelandic datives, brings an entirely fresh perspective to the vexed and
very interesting question of the role of the Icelandic dative in the grammar of the
language. The thesis digs satisfyingly deep and looks at the complex interrela-
tionships between the semantic underpinnings of case, the role of exceptions in
a system and how this plays out in terms of child language acquisition. It is well
known that the distribution of the Icelandic dative has been changing over time,
with terms like Dative Sickness or Dative Substitution being applied to the phe-
nomenon (e.g., Smith 1996; Jónsson 2013), but the underlying causes have been
up for debate. Semantic factors, particularly lexical semantic factors governing
the distribution of case in Icelandic, have been identified readily, but the con-
comitant identification of exceptions to the overall generalizations has posed a
problem for this direction of research. Nowenstein’s application of Charles Yang’s
Tolerance Principle (Yang 2016) to help think through the role of exceptions in
a system and the effects of exceptions on acquisition thus opens up a new and
promising way forward for an understanding of the distribution of case in Ice -
landic in terms of primarily semantic factors.
This is particularly significant with respect to the dative as the analysis of
datives crosslinguistically has been less than optimal, with most accounts of case
and argument structure focusing on “core” agent and patient arguments, viewing
the patterns to be explained mainly in terms of the morphosyntactic distribution
of case over canonical subjects/agents and objects/patients (e.g., the discussion of
nominative/accusative vs. ergative alignments, see Butt 2006 for an overview).
Datives (and genitives) do also get mentioned, but mostly as an afterthought and/
or as “quirky” types of exceptions when found with “core” subject and object
grammatical relations. It is thus very interesting to see the acquisition of the dative
being investigated in a language not only famous for its use of non-nominative
subjects (Zaenen et al. 1985), but also with respect to showing a spread of the
dative in certain “core” contexts as part of on-going language change.
Current formal linguistic thinking sees language acquisition as one of the
main drivers of language change. Given this, it is very welcome to have the hard
data contributed by the thesis on the usage and acquisition of case in various
cohorts of children learning Icelandic. This data from language acquisition turns
out to provide very solid support for the main hypothesis of the thesis, which
holds that the synchronic distribution of the dative case in Icelandic as well as the