Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-tf8b9 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-30T15:29:13.288Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Stylistic Fronting in spoken Icelandic relatives

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 July 2011

Jim Wood
Jim Wood*
Affiliation:
New York University Department of Linguistics, 10 Washington Place 2nd Floor, New York, NY 10003, USA. [email protected]
Get access

Abstract

Since Maling's (1980) study of embedded verb-second, Icelandic Stylistic Fronting has been an extensively studied aspect of Icelandic syntax. It is widely regarded as an optional fronting operation which moves an ordinarily post-verbal constituent to the pre-verbal domain just in case there is a subject gap. In this study, variationist methodology is employed to study quantitatively the conditioning effects of several syntactic and prosodic factors on Stylistic Fronting in two transcribed corpora of spoken Icelandic. The results show that some grammatical categories favor fronting more than others, and that fronting is affected by the number of syllables in the frontable constituent and the material surrounding the landing site. This lends support to the long-standing intuition that prosodic factors influence the choice to use Stylistic Fronting (which is syntactically optional), while at the same time suggests avenues for further research in addressing certain issues in the syntax of Stylistic Fronting, such as the ‘accessibility hierarchy’.

Keywords

Icelandicoptional movementprosodyStylistic Frontingsyntaxsyntax–prosody interface
Type
Research Article
Information
Nordic Journal of Linguistics , Volume 34 , Issue 1 , May 2011 , pp. 29 - 60
Copyright
Copyright © Nordic Association of Linguistics 2011

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

REFERENCES

Angantýsson, Ásgrímur. 2001. Skandinavísk orðaröð í íslenskum aukasetningum [Scandinavian word order in Icelandic embedded clauses]. Íslenskt mál og almenn málfræði 23, 95–122.Google Scholar
Angantýsson, Ásgrímur. 2007. Verb-third in embedded clauses in Icelandic. Studia Linguistica 61 (3), 237–260.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Angantýsson, Ásgrímur. 2011. The Syntax of Embedded Clauses in Icelandic and Related Languages. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Iceland.Google Scholar
Árnason, Kristján. 1985. Icelandic word stress and Metrical Phonology. Studia Linguistica 39, 93–129.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Árnason, Kristján. 1987. The stress of prefixes and suffixes in Icelandic. Nordic Prosody IV, 137–46.Google Scholar
Árnason, Kristján. 1996. How to meet the European standard: Word stress in Faroese and Icelandic. Nordlyd 24, 1–22.Google Scholar
Árnason, Kristján. 1998. Toward an analysis of Icelandic intonation. Nordic Prosody VII, 49–62.Google Scholar
Barnes, Michael. 1987. Some remarks on subordinate-clause word-order in Faroese. Scripta Islandica 38, 3–35.Google Scholar
Bošković, Željko. 2001. PF Merger in Scandinavian: Stylistic Fronting and Object Shift. Working Papers in Scandinavian Syntax 68, 75–115.Google Scholar
Bošković, Željko. 2003. On PF Merger: Stylistic Fronting and Object Shift in Scandinavian. Gengo Kenkyuu 123, 5–46.Google Scholar
Burton-Roberts, Noel & Poole, Geoffrey. 2006. Syntax vs. phonology: A representational approach to Stylistic Fronting and verb-second in Icelandic. Lingua 116, 562–600.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cardinaletti, Anna. 2003. Stylistic Fronting in Italian. In Delsing, Lars-Olof, Falk, Cecilia, Josefsson, Gunlög & Sigurðsson, Halldór Ármann (eds.), Grammatik i fokus/Grammar in Focus: Festschrift for Christer Platzack 18 November 2003, vol. II, 47–55. Lund: Department of Scandinavian Languages.Google Scholar
Dehé, Nicole. 2006. Some notes on the focus–prosody relation and phrasing in Icelandic. In Bruce, Gösta & Horne, Merle (eds.), Nordic Prosody: 9th Conference, Lund 2004, 47–56. Frankfurt, Berlin & New York: Peter Lang.Google Scholar
Dehé, Nicole. 2008. To delete or not to delete: The contexts of Icelandic Final Vowel Deletion. Lingua 118 (5), 732–753.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dehé, Nicole. 2009. An intonational grammar for Icelandic. Nordic Journal of Linguistics 32 (1), 5–34.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Delsing, Lars-Olof. 2001. Stylistic Fronting: Evidence from Old Scandinavian. Working Papers in Scandinavian Syntax 68, 147–171.Google Scholar
Falk, Cecilia. 1993. Non-referential Subjects in the History of Swedish. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Lund.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fischer, Susann & Alexiadou, Artemis. 2001. On Stylistic Fronting: Germanic vs. Romance. Working Papers in Scandinavian Syntax 68, 117–145.Google Scholar
Fontana, Josep. 1993. Phrase Structure and the Syntax of Clitics in the History of Spanish. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Pennsylvania.Google Scholar
Harley, Heidi & Noyer, Rolf. 1998. Mixed nominalizations, short verb movement and object shift in English. In Tamanji, Pius N. & Kusumoto, Kiyomi (eds.), NELS 28, 143–157. Amherst: University of Massachusetts, GLSA.Google Scholar
Holmberg, Anders. 2000. Scandinavian Stylistic Fronting: How any category can become an expletive. Linguistic Inquiry 31, 445–483.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Holmberg, Anders. 2005. Stylistic Fronting. In Everaert, Martin & van Riemsdijk, Henk (eds.), The Blackwell Companion to Syntax, 530–563. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Hrafnbjargarson, Gunnar Hrafn. 2004. Stylistic Fronting. Studia Linguistica 58 (2), 88–134.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ingason, Anton Karl. 2008a. Interaction between phonology and syntax in Icelandic: Arguments for a strongly parallel OT-analysis. Presented at Phonological Workshop, University of Iceland, 16 May.Google Scholar
Ingason, Anton Karl. 2008b. Hrynkerfi íslensku í bestunarkenningu [Icelandic prosody in Optimality Theory]. B.A. thesis, University of Iceland. Available at http://www3.hi.is/~antoni/skjol/hrynkerfi.pdf.Google Scholar
Jaeger, T. Florian. To appear. Phonological optimization and syntactic variation: The case of optional that. BLS 32.Google Scholar
Jóhannsson, Jón Yngvi. 2006. Realism and revolt: Between the world wars. In Neijmann, Daisy (ed.), A History of Icelandic Literature, 357–403. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press.Google Scholar
Johnson, Daniel Ezra. 2009. Getting off the GoldVarb standard: Introducing Rbrul for mixed-effects variable rule analysis. Language and Linguistics Compass 3 (1), 359–383.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jónsson, Jóhannes Gísli. 1991. Stylistic Fronting in Icelandic. Working Papers in Scandinavian Syntax 48, 1–43.Google Scholar
Jónsson, Jóhannes Gísli. 1992. The two perfects of Icelandic. Íslenskt mál og almenn málfræði 14, 129–145.Google Scholar
Jónsson, Jóhannes Gísli & Eythórsson, Thórhallur. 2005. Variation in subject case marking in Insular Scandinavian. Nordic Journal of Linguistics 28 (2), 223–245.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kroch, Anthony & Taylor, Ann. 1997. Verb movement in Old and Middle English: Dialect variation and language contact. In van Kemenade, Ans & Vincent, Nigel (eds.), Parameters of Morphosyntactic Change, 297–325. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Larsson, Ida. 2008. Becoming perfect: Observations on Icelandic vera búinn að. Íslenskt mál og almenn málfræði 30, 53–92.Google Scholar
Maling, Joan. 1980. Inversion in embedded clauses in Modern Icelandic. Íslenskt mál og almenn málfræði 2, 173–193. [Reprinted in 1990, in Joan Maling & Annie Zaenen (eds.), Modern Icelandic Syntax, 71–90. New York: Academic Press.]Google Scholar
Mathieu, Eric. 2006. Stylistic Fronting in Old French. Probus 18, 219–266.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ott, Dennis. 2009. Stylistic Fronting as remnant movement. Working Papers in Scandinavian Syntax 83, 141–178.Google Scholar
Poole, Geoffrey. 1997. Stylistic Fronting in Icelandic: A case study in prosodic X°-movement. Newcastle and Durham Working Papers in Linguistics 4, 249–285.Google Scholar
Poole, Geoffrey. 2007. Defining the ‘subject gap’ requirement: Stylistic Fronting in Germanic and Romance. Working Papers in Scandinavian Syntax 79, 1–19.Google Scholar
Rizzi, Luigi. 1990. Relativized Minimality. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Rögnvaldsson, Eiríkur & Thráinsson, Höskuldur. 1990. On Icelandic word order once more. In Maling, Joan & Zaenen, Annie (eds.), Modern Icelandic Syntax, 3–38. New York: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Sankoff, David, Tagliamonte, Sali & Smith, Eric. 2005. GoldVarb X: A variable rule application for Windows. http://individual.utoronto.ca/tagliamonte/Goldvarb/GV_index.htm (retrieved 15 January 2008).Google Scholar
Sigurðsson, Halldór Ármann. 1986. Verb post-second in a V2 language. In Dahl, Östen & Holmberg, Anders (eds.), Scandinavian Syntax, 138–149. Stockholm: Institute of Linguistics.Google Scholar
Sigurðsson, Halldór Ármann. 1989. Verbal Syntax and Case in Icelandic. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Lund.Google Scholar
Sigurðsson, Halldór Ármann. 1997. Stylistic Fronting. Presented at the Second Anual International Tromsø Workshop on Linguistics, University of Tromsø.Google Scholar
Sigurðsson, Halldór Ármann. 2004. The syntax of person, tense, and speech features. Italian Journal of Linguistics/Rivista di Linguistica 16, 219–251.Google Scholar
Sigurðsson, Halldór Ármann. 2010. On EPP effects. Studia Linguistica 64, 159–189.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Svenonius, Peter. 2007. Adpositions, particles and the arguments they introduce. In Reuland, Eric, Bhattacharya, Tanmoy & Spathas, Giorgos (eds.), Argument Structure, 63–103. Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Thráinsson, Höskuldur. 1986. V1, V2, V3 in Icelandic. In Haider, Hubert & Prinzhorn, Martin (eds.), Verb-Second Phenomena in Germanic Languages, 169–194. Dordrecht: Foris.Google Scholar
Thráinsson, Höskuldur. 1979. On complementation in Icelandic. Ph.D. dissertation, Harvard University.Google Scholar
Thráinsson, Höskuldur. 2007. The Syntax of Icelandic. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Thráinsson, Höskuldur, Svavarsdóttir, Ásta, Eythórsson, Thórhallur & Jónsson, Jóhannes Gísli. 2005. The Icelandic (Pilot) Project in ScanDiaSyn. PowerPoint presentation from Grand Meeting for Scandinavian Dialect Syntax, Leikanger, Norway, 26 August 2005. http://uit.no/getfile.php?PageId=6795&FileId=61 (retrieved 25 February 2009).Google Scholar
Thráinsson, Höskuldur, Angantýsson, Ásgrímur, Svavarsdóttir, Ásta, Eythórsson, Thórhallur & Jónsson, Jóhannes Gísli. 2007. The Icelandic (Pilot) Project in ScanDiaSyn. Nordlyd 34, 87–124.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Trips, Carola. 2003. Stylistic Fronting in the Ormulum – Scandinavian syntactic phenomena in Early Middle English texts. Nordlyd 31, 457–472.Google Scholar
Wiklund, Anna-Lena, Hrafnbjargarson, Gunnar Hrafn, Kristine, Bentzen & Hróarsdóttir, Þórbjörg. 2007. Rethinking Scandinavian verb movement. The Journal of Comparative Germanic Linguistics 10 (3), 203–233.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wiklund, Anna-Lena, Bentzen, Kristine, Hrafnbjargarson, Gunnar Hrafn & Hróarsdóttir, Þórbjörg. 2009. On the distribution and illocution of V2 in Scandinavian that-clauses. Lingua 119, 1914–1938.CrossRefGoogle Scholar