Íslenskt mál og almenn málfræði - 01.01.2023, Page 203

on-going changes and the acquisition by children, particularly in situations where
the dative alternates with an accusative or nominative, must be understood main-
ly in semantic terms. This is not to say that morphosyntax does not play a role –
Nowenstein shows it does – but she also shows very clearly that if one does not
take the semantic contribution of case marking into account, one fails to be able
to properly account for the synchronic distribution, on-going change and child
language acquisition patterns of case in Icelandic.
I find Nowenstein’s results especially interesting because they confirm my
own independent conclusions with respect to the role of case in South Asian lan-
guages, where I have shown in detail for Urdu/Hindi that case marking is gov-
erned by a complex mixture of semantic and structural constraints (Butt and
King 2004), that semantics plays a larger role than usually acknowledged or
expected in formal theories of grammar and that purely structural approaches
cannot capture the full range of patterns (Butt 2022b).
Urdu/Hindi is an Indo-Aryan language with a documented history that
stretches back over 4000 years. The Old Indo-Aryan ancestor language was San -
s krit, whose inflectional case system was similar to that of its Indo-European sis-
ter languages Ancient Greek and Latin. This inflectional system was lost over the
space of several hundred years during Middle Indo-Aryan and then reinvented in
many New Indo-Aryan languages, among them Urdu/Hindi, with a system of
case clitics that were drawn primarily from originally spatial terms (e.g., Hewson
and Bubenik 2006; Reinöhl 2016; Butt and Deo 2017; Butt 2022a).
The innovation of new case markers in Indo-Aryan began from about 1100
CE on (which is just about when the Icelandic written record begins). Today’s
Urdu/Hindi dative case clitic ko was derived from an originally spatial term that
roughly meant ‘at’. The first instances of ko (around 1200 CE, see Butt and
Ahmed 2011) can be found on: 1) concrete goals (giving something to someone
and the someone is marked with ko); 2) objects of verbs like ‘seek’, which can be
argued to also involve a goal or an endpoint of some sort, hence being marked
with ko; 3) sentient beings that are being treated as abstract locations, resulting
in an experiencer semantics (e.g., ‘grief is at me’). These various different uses are
found in the modern system as well, with the original ‘endpoint’ semantics prob-
ably laying the foundations for the specificity and animacy conditions on the
Differential Object Marking (DOM; Bossong 1985; Aissen 2003) found in cur-
rent Urdu/Hindi as well (Butt 1993; Bhatt and Anagnostopoulou 1996), illustrat-
ed in (1).
(1)a. yasin=ne kamputar xarid-a
Yassin.m.sg=erg computer.m.sg.nom buy-perf.m.sg
‘Yassin bought a/some computer.’
b. yasin=ne kamputar=ko xarid-a
Yassin.m.sg=erg computer.m.sg=acc buy-perf.m.sg
‘Yassin bought a (certain)/the computer.’
Icelandic datives: A view from South Asia 203