Rich agreement, everything else being equal and large-scale cross-linguistic comparison

Abstract

Let us look first at the central notion of “rich verb agreement”, supposed to provide the explanation for the differences between ISc and MSc. Holmberg never gives any clear criteria for what it means for a language to have “rich verb agreement”, but rather “illustrates” it by showing verb paradigms from Modern Icelandic and Standard Swedish. In those paradigms, i.e. the present and past indicative of weak verbs, Icelandic displays nine different verb forms, whereas tense is the only distinction made in Swedish. Holmberg assumes that MSc languages are all like Standard Swedish in this regard (e.g. Section 4.5: “MSc has no overt subject-verb agreement”). However, while this is true of the three standard MSc languages, it does not hold for all spoken varieties of Scandinavian, and it is only recently that it became true of written Swedish. Many traditional dialects in different parts of Sweden distinguish singular and plural forms of verbs, as did the written language until the mid 20th century. Some dialects (Gotland, Halland) have special forms in the 2nd person singular, and some (Dalarna, Halland) have special forms in the 1st person plural. Based on Falk (1993), Holmberg claims that verb agreement “underwent a change in Swedish from an ISc system to a MSc system” about the 16th century. However, the disappearance of the agreement system in Swedish was a gradual affair, at least in the written language. In the paradigms corresponding to those shown by Holmberg, Old Swedish (i.e. the language used before the 16th century) had 7–8 distinct forms (Wessen 1965: 133). In the language of the 1917 Bible translation, there were still five distinct forms (with separate 2nd plurals for both tenses and a separate 1st/3rd present plural). Until about 1945, 3 separate forms were standard. The statement from Holmberg would seem to imply that the crucial change was between 7 and 5 forms, making most modern varieties conform to his picture. AUTHOR’S COPY | AUTORENEXEMPLAR