Word Order Change in Icelandic: From OV to VO (Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today)

While Modern Icelandic exhibits a virtually uniform VO order in the VP, Old(er) Icelandic had both VO order and OV order, as well as ‘mixed’ word order patterns. In this volume, the author both examines the various VP-word order patterns from a descriptive and statistical point of view and provides a synchronic and diachronic analysis of VP-syntax in Old(er) Icelandic in terms of generative grammar. Her account makes use of a number of independently motivated ideas, notably remnant-movement of various kinds of predicative phrase, and the long movement associated with “restructuring” phenomena, to provide an analysis of OV orders and, correspondingly, a proposal as to which aspect of Icelandic syntax must have changed when VO word order became the norm: the essential change is loss of VP-extraction from VP. Although this idea is mainly supported here for Icelandic, it has numerous implications for the synchronic and diachronic analysis of other Germanic languages. la.35 WORD ORDER CHANGE IN ICELANDIC 2 Editorial page 3 Title page 4 LCC page 5 Table of Contents 8 Acknowledgements 14 Chapter 1. Introduction 16 Chapter 2. Diachronic Syntax 28 Chapter 3. Synchronic Theoretical Background 52 Chapter 4. The Decline of OV Word Order 68 Chapter 5. Base Word Order 94 Chapter 6. The Nature of Preverbal Objects 124 Chapter 7. Word Order Patterns 192 Chapter 8. Object Positions 242 Chapter 9. Parameter Change 272 Chapter 10. Summary and Conclusions 360 Appendices 368 Appendix 1: Primary texts 368 Appendix 2: Authors of nineteenth century letters 369 Appendix 3: Bibliographical information for the nineteenth century letters 372 Appendix 4: Preverbal nominal objects left 372 Appendix 5: The decline of pure word order patterns within multiple complements 373 Appendix 6: The decline of mixed word order patterns 375 References 378 Subject Index 394 The Series LINGUISTIK AKTUELL/LINGUISTICS TODAY 401 The goal of this title is to track down the development of word order change in Icelandic verb phrases, and to analyze the word order at different stages in the history of Icelandic. The text is intended for researchers specializing in studying Icelandic or linguistics.