Object inversion in Icelandic and the Risamálheild Corpus

Jóhannes Gísli Jónsson

doi:10.5617/osla.8498

Abstract

This paper discusses Object Inversion in Icelandic syntax, i.e. examples where the direct object precedes the indirect object (DO-IO orders) in active clauses. In contrast to the neutral IO-DO order, Object Inversion is incredibly rare with most ditransitive verbs and more or less restricted to ditransitive verbs in the DAT-ACC class. This is shown by extensive searches in the new Risamálheild Corpus. These searches also show that Object Inversion strongly favors examples where the DO encodes old information and is phonologically lighter than the following IO. These results yield new and important insights into the study of Object Inversion but also confirm earlier claims in the literature.

Highlights

This paper discusses Object Inversion in Icelandic syntax, i.e. examples where the direct object precedes the indirect object (DO-IO orders) in active clauses
The neutral order of two objects in active clauses in Icelandic is indirect object (IO) before a direct object (DO). This is shown by the fact that IO-DO orders are not subject to any known syntactic or semantic-pragmatic constraints. This is not the case with DO-IO orders created by so called Object Inversion as they are basically restricted to verbs with a dative indirect object and an accusative direct object (DAT-ACC verbs), the biggest class of ditransitive verbs in Icelandic
The marked status of Object Inversion is shown by the various factors that DO-IO orders are sensitive to and become readily apparent when the Risamálheild Corpus (RC) (Steingrímsson et al 2018) is searched for relevant examples as we will discuss in more detail below

Summary

Introduction

This paper discusses Object Inversion in Icelandic syntax, i.e. examples where the direct object precedes the indirect object (DO-IO orders) in active clauses. The marked status of Object Inversion is shown by the various factors that DO-IO orders are sensitive to and become readily apparent when the Risamálheild Corpus (RC) (Steingrímsson et al 2018) is searched for relevant examples as we will discuss in more detail below. We found DO-IO orders with a particular verb in the DAT-ACC class by searching for that verb followed by a word string containing one or two words with accusative case followed by another word with dative case.

Results

Conclusion