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Case alternations in Icelandic ‘get’-passives

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 April 2013

Einar Freyr Sigurðsson  and
Jim Wood
Einar Freyr Sigurðsson
Affiliation:
University of Pennsylvania, Department of Linguistics, 619 Williams Hall, 255 S 36th St, Philadelphia, PA 19104, USA. [email protected]
Jim Wood
Affiliation:
Yale University, Department of Linguistics, 370 Temple St, New Haven, CT 06520, USA. [email protected]
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Abstract

The analysis of ‘get’-passives across Germanic poses a number of challenges to our understanding of valency alternations: they exhibit surprising case alternations and recalcitrant thematic properties (Alexiadou 2012, Alexiadou, Anagnostopoulou & Sevdali to appear). In this article, we present novel data on ‘get’-passives in Icelandic; while Icelandic has played an important role in our understanding of case marking and valency alternations, ‘get’-passives have not, to our knowledge, been studied in this language before. By situating ‘get’-passives within the landscape of well-established case patterns of Icelandic, we are able to argue in favor of the following conclusions: (i) Icelandic ‘get’-passives involve unambiguously verbal passives; (ii) the surface subject of recipient ‘get’-passives (‘I got a letter sent to me’) does not originate as the dative indirect object of the passive participle, but rather originates as an (external) argument of ‘get’; and (iii) at least some intransitive ‘get’-passives (‘This got changed’) involve anticausativization of the corresponding causative ‘get’-passive (‘I got this changed’), as proposed for English by Haegeman (1985).

Keywords

anticausativesapplicativescase-marking‘get’-passivesIcelandicmiddle voicepassive
Type
Research Article
Information
Nordic Journal of Linguistics , Volume 35 , Special Issue 3: Case Variation and Change in the Nordic Languages , December 2012 , pp. 269 - 312
Copyright
Copyright © Nordic Association of Linguistics 2013

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