| 1. |
- Barddal, Johanna
(författare)
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Case in Icelandic : A Synchronic, Diachronic and Comparative Approach
- 2001
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This dissertation addresses the question of what the function of morphological case is in Icelandic. The working hypotheses of this book is that morphological case is a multifunctional category. Firstly, new verbs in Icelandic were collected and examined to cast light on the productivity of the morphological cases, revealing that not only are the nominative and accusative productive in Icelandic but also the dative. Secondly, a text-based investigation was conducted to find out what the statistical correlation is between morphological case, syntactic functions and thematic roles. Thus, a well-stratified corpus was compiled, containing Modern Icelandic texts from five written genres and one spoken genre. The study showed that there is a correlation between morphological case and both syntactic and semantic factors. Thirdly, a similar corpus was compiled for Old Icelandic, containing four genres which are closest in content to the Modern Icelandic genres. Some frequency differences were found between the two corpora, reflecting a change in the use of morphological case from Old to Modern Icelandic. Fourthly, a comparison of the development of case in English, Swedish and German revealed that the internal order of the changes within the case system is the same for the Germanic languages considered, with English leading the development, followed closely by Swedish, then German, and Icelandic lagging behind. The theoretical approach adopted in this work is that of Construction Grammar and the Usage-based model.
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| 2. |
- Barddal, Johanna, et al.
(författare)
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Reconstructing constructional semantics : The dative subject construction in Old Norse-Icelandic, Latin, Ancient Greek, Old Russian and Old Lithuanian
- 2012
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Ingår i: Studies in Language. - : John Benjamins Publishing Company. - 0378-4177 .- 1569-9978. ; 36:3, s. 511-547
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- As the historical linguistic community is well aware, reconstructing semantics is a notoriously difficult undertaking. Such reconstruction has so far mostly been carried out on lexical items, like words and morphemes, and has not been conducted for larger and more complex linguistic units, which intuitively seems to be a more intricate task, especially given the lack of methodological criteria and guidelines within the field. This follows directly from the fact that most current theoretical frameworks are not construction-based, that is, they do not assume that constructions are form-meaning correspondences. In order to meet this challenge, we present an attempt at reconstructing constructional semantics, and more precisely the semantics of the Dative Subject Construction for an earlier stage of Indo-European. For this purpose we employ lexical semantic verb classes in combination with the semantic map model (Bar partial derivative dal 2007, Bar partial derivative dal, Kristoffersen & Sveen 2011), showing how incredibly stable semantic fields may remain across long time spans, and how reconstructing such semantic fields may be accomplished
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| 3. |
- Barddal, Johanna, et al.
(författare)
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The change that never happened: the story of oblique subjects
- 2003
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Ingår i: Journal of Linguistics. - 0022-2267. ; 39:3, s. 439-472
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- This paper contributes to an ongoing debate on the syntactic status of oblique subject-like NPs in the ‘impersonal’ construction (of the type me-thinks) in Old Germanic. The debate is caused by the lack of canonical subject case marking in such NPs. It has been argued that these NPs are syntactic objects, but we provide evidence for their subject status, as in Modern Icelandic and Faroese. Thus, we argue that the syntactic status of the oblique subject-like NPs has not changed at all from object status to subject status, contra standard claims in the literature. Our evidence stems from Old Icelandic, but the analysis has implications for the other old Germanic languages as well. However, a change from non-canonical to canonical subject case marking (‘Nominative Sickness’) has affected all the Germanic languages to a varying degree.
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| 4. |
- Barðdal, Jóhanna, et al.
(författare)
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The Story of 'Woe'
- 2013
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Ingår i: Journal of Indo-European Studies. - 0092-2323. ; 41:3-4, s. 321-377
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- In contrast to the received consensus in the historical-comparative linguistic community, we argue that syntactic reconstruction is both a plausible and a feasible enterprise. We illustrate this with an investigation of the syntactic behavior of *wai 'woe' across five subbranches of Indo-European, i.e. Indo-Iranian, Italic, Baltic, Slavic and Germanic. The adverbial interjection *wai 'woe' is found instantiating three different constructions, which we label: 1) the Bare Exclamative Construction, 2) the Dative Exclamative Construction, and 3) the Predicative Construction. We suggest that the Predicative Construction is archaic in the Indo-European languages, and that the Dative Exclamative Construction has developed from a focalized variant of the Predicative Construction, used in exclamatory context, since 'woe' is the quintessential candidate for being focused in situations of adversity. On the basis of the comparative evidence, all three constructions must be reconstructed for Proto-Indo-European, as well as a subject verb construction, which determines the default word order properties between the subject and the verb, and finally a focus construction where focalized material occurs in first position. We couch our analysis within the formalism of Sign-Based Construction Grammar, establishing beyond doubt that syntactic reconstruction is a viable endeavor within historical-comparative linguistics.
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| 5. |
- Dunn, Michael, et al.
(författare)
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Dative sickness : Aphylogenetic analysis of argument structure evolution in Germanic
- 2017
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Ingår i: Language. - : Project Muse. - 0097-8507 .- 1535-0665. ; 93:1, s. E1-E22
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- A major argument against the feasibility of reconstructing syntax for proto-stages is the widely discussed lack of directionality of syntactic change. In a recent typology of changes in argument structure constructions based on Germanic (Barodal 2015), several different, yet opposing, changes are reported. These include, among others, processes sometimes called dative sickness, nominative sickness, and accusative sickness. In order to tease apart the roles of the different processes, we have carried out a phylogenetic trait analysis on a predefined data set of twelve predicates found across the Germanic phyla using the MULTISTATE method. This is, as far as we are aware, the first application of the MULTISTATE method (Pagel et al. 2004) in historical syntax. The results clearly favor one of the models, the dative sickness model, over any other model, as this model is the only one that can accurately account for both the observed diversity of case frames and the independently proposed philological reconstructions. Methods of evolutionary trait analysis can be used to model evolutionary paths of argument structure constructions, and they provide the perfect testing ground for hypotheses arrived at through philological reconstruction, based on classical historical-comparative methods.
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