We discuss remarkable constructions in Icelandic that have the distributive pronoun hvor ‘each’ in common: the reciprocal construction hvor annar ‘each other’, and the distributive construction hvor sinn ‘each their’, which also comes in a sinn hvor ‘their each’ version. We provide the first detailed description of these constructions, in particular their case and word order properties, which raise recalcitrant puzzles, and then we discuss what they say about the syntax of nonfinite verbs. Specifically, the word order and case properties of these constructions indicate that nonfinite verbs in Icelandic undergo short verb movement within the verb phrase. That is, the evidence indicates that the leftmost element in these constructions, alternatively hvor or sinn, originates inside an object DP and moves, by what we call e-raising, to the base position of an antecedent with which it agrees, before being stranded by that very antecedent. Nevertheless, the verb appears to the left of this element, even when it is a nonfinite verb, showing that it must undergo short movement to the left of Spec,vP. In addition, the interaction of e-raising and case has important consequences for Case theory, as it indicates that case agreement and case marking take place in PF.

This article describes and discusses an ongoing change of case marking, NOM(inative) > OBL(ique), in certain predicates in Swedish (type Då kan du vara jag > Då kan du vara mig). This change has gone largely unnoticed hitherto. The discussion is based on a large-scale online survey, conducted in May 2016. It was tested whether the change relates to finiteness or to semantics. The results strongly indicate that the latter is the case. The change is found in predicates that express role semantics but nondetectable in predicates with plain identity readings (type Det är jag). In addition, there are strong indications that the change is closely related to another change that is also taking place in Swedish, NOM > OBL in comparative phrases (type Hon är större än jag > Hon är större än mig). The results speak against the hypothesis that OBL is becoming default in Swedish. Instead, it seems that many speakers are reanalyzing role predicates as well as comparative phrases such that they contain a head that is a case assigner, an overt one in comparatives but a silent one in role predicates. The article concludes that Swedish is largely retaining its basic NOM-OBL case system.

The articles published in this issue are a selection of papers presented at a workshop on Case in Case-impoverished Germanic, held at the University of Lund, October 5–6, 2017.Genitives aside, case...

AbstractThis article discusses language universality and language variation, and suggests that there is no feature variation in initial syntax, featural variation arising by metamorphosis under transfer from syntax to PF-morphology. In particular, it explores the Zero Hypothesis, stating that Universal Grammar, UG, only provides two building elements, Root Zero and Edge Feature Zero, zero, as they are purely structural/formal elements with no semantic content in UG. Their potential content is provided by the Concept Mine, a mind-internal but language-external department. UG and narrow syntax has access to the Concept Mine, and this Syntax-Concept Access is unique to humans, a prerequisite for the evolution of language (Section 1). A related idea (also inSection 1) is coined the Generalized Edge Feature Approach, GEFA. It states that Merge always involves at least one edge feature, which precludes symmetric structures and enables Simplest Merge (no Pair-Merge, no Hilbert epsilon operator). The article advocates that there is no syntactic feature selection (Section 2), all syntactic features being universally accessible in the Concept Mine, via Root Zero and Edge Feature Zero. In contrast, there is feature selection in PF (including morphology), yielding variation (Section 3), Gender being a clear example (Section 4). However, there is a widely neglected syntax-to-PF-morphology metamorphosis (Section 5), such that morphological features like [past] are distinct from albeit related to syntactic features like Speech Time. Parameters operate on selected PF features, and not on purely syntactic features, so parameter setting is plausibly closely tied to the syntax-to-PF-morphology metamorphosis (the concludingSection 6). It is suggested that parameters are on the externalization side of language, part of or related to the sensory-motor system, facilitating motoric learning in language acquisition.

This article discusses and analyzes an unusual construction in Icelandic, with a plural pronoun in the singular reading and a directly juxtaposed or annexed NP (or DP), where, for example, 'við Ólafur' (literally “we.NOM Olaf.NOM”) means ‘Olaf and I’. We refer to this construction as Pro[NP]. Pro[NP] constructions have been reported for a handful of languages that lack a case system. Icelandic, in contrast, is a case language, and Pro[NP] in this language is 'case congruent': the pronoun and its NP/DP annex are always in the same case. No such language has to our knowledge ever been described in detail before; we provide the first in-depth investigation of case-congruent Pro[NP]. The article further compares the Icelandic construction to apparently similar constructions, including English 'we linguists' and the Russian type of Pro[x-NP], as in 'my s Petej' (literally “we.NOM with Peter.INSTR”), meaning ‘Peter and I’, showing that the Icelandic construction differs from these, despite having similar (but not identical) semantic properties. We propose that plural personal pronouns consist of two parts: a set of variables, {X, Y}, that determine the form of the pronoun, and an NP annex, which constrains the interpretation of the Y variable. Typically, the annex is phonetically silent (bare plural pronouns), but the Icelandic construction is unusual in that the annex is partly overt, thereby allowing a rare insight into the construction of plural personal pronouns.

This paper discusses topicality in Icelandic grammar as realized in several phenomena: referential third person pro drop in Old Icelandic, diverse types of topic drop in Old and Modern Icelandic, and Narrative Inversion (declarative VS clauses), also in both Old and Modern Icelandic. These phenomena all involve aboutness topics, given topics or both, thus showing that distinct types of topicality are active in Icelandic. However, in contrast to Italian, Icelandic does not provide evidence that different topic types have different structural correlates, a fact that suggests that topicality types are not generally structuralized in language (while not excluding that a topicality hierarchy may be PF-licensed by externalization properties specific to languages like Italian). Topicality is presumably a universally available category or phenomenon, but it is plausibly an interface third factor phenomenon (in the sense of Chomsky 2005), not provided by Universal Grammar but interacting with it in the shaping of externalized grammar, differently so in different languages.

This article describes and discusses two peculiar sets of (in)defi nitenessfacts applying to subjects in Icelandic, here referred to as Subject Floatand Low Subject Trapping. Indefi nite subjects (commonly quantifi ed) inpresentational sentences and related clause types may either occupy thecomplement position within the predicate phrase or “fl oat” into variouspositions in the middle fi eld. This is Subject Float, yielding variation suchas “There would (many farmers) then (many farmers) probably (manyfarmers) be (?*many farmers) elected (many farmers)”. Conversely, andunexpectedly, defi nite NP subjects of some adjectival and verbal predicatesmust stay in the complement position. This is Low Subject Trapping,yielding orders such as “there is cold radiator-the” and “there cooledradiator-the”. It is shown that the licensing of subject NPs in the variouspositions in Subject Float and in the complement position in Low SubjectTrapping is unrelated to specifi c grammatical cases, thus refuting the widelyadopted case approach to NP licensing. Although Icelandic case markinghas been widely discussed, Subject Float and Low Subject Trapping havenot previously received a detailed scrutiny; these phenomena provideadditional and partly new knockout arguments against the case approach toNP licensing and NP movement. While high NP raising to subject (Spec,IP)is unaffected by case, it seems to involve both Person and Topic matching. (Less)

This article develops an analysis of Gender whereby D-gender enters grammar as a feature variable (edge linker), without a fixed value, either probing n or scanning the context for a value. Only the latter strategy is available in pronominal gender languages such as English, as they lack n-gender, whereas both strategies are applicable in n-gender languages, variably so for variable DPs, depending on their nP content and on context. The article adopts the idea that context linking does not merely involve pragmatic context scanning but also has a syntactic side to it, edge computation, whereby context-scanned and recycled features are computed at the phase edge in relation to CP-internal elements, via edge linkers. The context-linking approach has been previously launched for Tense and Person. This article extends it to Gender, thereby generalizing over context-sensitive grammatical categories and developing a novel view of the overall architecture of grammar.

In this article we report on a systematic comparison of presentational sentencesin Icelandic and Swedish, looking in particular at possible thematicroles of the pivot and how they correlate with positional options. Despitesome well-known differences between the languages (only Icelandic allows‘high’ IP-pivots and pivots with transitive verbs), it turns out that the restrictionson VP-pivots are similar, both in terms of roles and positions.VP-pivots have to be Themes and may co-occur with other DPs, but onlyif the pivot is the last DP argument. We show how these restrictions to someextent reflect the argument structure proposed in Platzack (2010). In additionwe show that we need to distinguish presentational sentences among thedifferent Transitive Expletive Constructions discussed in Hakansson (2017). (Less)

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Stylistic Fronting (SF) is a process that fronts various types of non-subjects to the preverbal position in subjectless clauses (“that gone have”, etc.). With the exception of Icelandic and to some extent Faroese, SF has disappeared from Scandinavian varieties. It is commonly assumed that even in Icelandic it is formal and old fashioned, indicating that it might be on its way out of this language as well. However, this has not been substantiated or supported by frequency surveys in large written language corpora. This paper studies the distribution and frequency of Stylistic Fronting in two such corpora, Timarit.is and the World Wide Web, across two distinct SF domains: Subject relatives and subjectless impersonal (mostly adverbial) clauses. The survey yields support to the common assumption that SF is on the retreat. In relative clauses verb-initial order (V1) seems to be on the increase at the expense of SF, whereas it is expletive það ‘there, it’ insertion that is on the increase in impersonal clauses. Nevertheless, the survey also highlights that both these changes proceed slowly. SF still has a strong foothold in everyday written Icelandic, in particular in certain impersonal clause types. Also V1 is quite natural in some impersonal clauses, suggesting that filling the left edge of CP is not a strict syntactic requirement but rather an externalization or performance target, a commonly desirable PF goal, as it were. An extra methodological result of the study is that it shows that Google Search may well be (carefully) used as a research tool in linguistics – no small an advantage. (Less)

This essay pursues The Split T Analysis, claiming that finite clauses have three syntactically active T heads, roughly corresponding to the Reichenbachian S, R, E: Speech Tense, TS, in the C-domain, Referential Tense, TR (or simply T) in the T-domain, and Event Tense, TE, in the v-domain. This analysis, it is argued, enables a coherent account of the relationship between Tense morphology (including Tense Agreement) and Tense syntax (including Sequence of Tenses phenomena and Double Access Readings).

Gender is commonly treated as a central phi-category of syntax, on a par with number and person. This paper argues against this view, claiming that grammatical gender is not part of narrow syntax, instead being part of PF (the externalization component) in gender languages. Nevertheless, gender is a reflection of an abstract D/edge linker in syntax. Phase edge linkers (in the sense of Sigurðsson 2011a, 2014b and related work) are themselves silent by necessity, but they may (or may not) have displaced phase-internal correlates or effects in PF. Personal pronouns, it is also argued, have no lexical content. Rather, they get feature specified in the course of the syntactic and morphological derivation, copying the gender of an antecedent via edge linkers. The facts studied come mostly from Icelandic, a language with a three gender system of the classical three gender Indo-European type. These facts indicate that grammatical gender is not an inherent property of nominal roots and they also suggest that gender reference of both overt pronouns and PRO involves control rather than movement. In addition, they reveal that the gender (conception) of speech act participants accesses formal grammar–via phase edge linkers.

Language is context free in the sense that it builds well-formed structures like "ideas sleep" and "ghosts live" (NP + VP) without regard to meaning and specific contexts (Chomslcy, 1957). However, it is also context sensitive in the sense that it makes use of linguistic objects such as personal pronouns and other indexical expressions that cannot have any reference unless they are embedded in some specific context. This (apparent) context-free/context-sensitive paradox is the focus of this essay. It pursues the idea that phases in the sense of Chomsky (2001) and related work - the minimal computational domains of language - are equipped with silent linking edge features that enable syntax to compute elements of a phase in relation to other phases, thereby also enabling narrow syntax to link to context and build the structures of broad syntax. Evidence for the edge linkers comes from overt phase internal effects, including person and tense marking, person shift of pronouns (indexical shift), the syntax of inclusiveness, and gender agreement across clause (phase) boundaries. Scrutiny of these phenomena suggests that nominal reference is exhaustively syntactic. Syntax therefore communicates with context, but it does so indirectly, via silent edge linkers. The inherent silence of these linkers, in turn, is the reason why the context-syntax relation has been such an opaque problem in linguistics and philosophy. (C) 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Abstract in Undetermined The verb lata ‘let/make’ in Icelandic provides a unique opportunity to understand the behavior symmetric versus asymmetric DAT-NOM constructions, as well as the nature of nominative-accusative case alternations. In this paper, we take a close look at lata and examine a set of cases where DAT-NOM verbs are embedded under lata, resulting in the otherwise nominative object becoming accusative in some cases and remaining nominative in others.