Kuhn's Laws in Old Icelandic Prose and Poetry

Abstract

The paper is intended to shed light on the so-called Kuhn's laws pertaining to early Germanic word order and intonation. This is done by investigating the metrical function of different morphosyntactic categories in Old Icelandic meters and interpreting their behavior on the basis of insights from modern intonational phonology. Verb forms belonging to independent clauses cannot fill the last foot in lines in dróttkvætt poetry. This is taken to show that phonology was involved in the word order restrictions in Old Icelandic, among them the verb-second (V2) constraint, which is often assumed to be syntactically governed.The work reported in this paper started during a sabbatical at Stanford University under a Fulbright fellowship in 1998–1999. I would like to thank Paul Kiparsky, my sponsor there, for inspiration and help with some crucial issues. I would also like to thank the participants in the Metrics conference in Toronto, October 8–9, 1999, and the GLAC–7 conference in Banff, April 21–23, 2001, for comments on presentations of parts of the work. Finally, thanks go to the editor, Mark Louden, and two anonymous reviewers for suggestions for improvement and editorial guidance.