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Málkerfisbreytingar í félagslegu samhengi

Útdráttur

In this paper some of the major results of the author's dissertation on the morphological and phonological development of the Icelandic middle voice are summarised. One of the two problems discussed here is the development of the first person singular, where forms identical to the third person forms (e.g. gerist) supplant older forms with - umst (e.g. gerumst) or (later) -unst. This change takes place from the late 15th to the mid 18th century. The occurrence of new forms in 14th century texts is a Norwegianism, concentrated to certain types of texts, and without grammatical patterning. Although the first person singular middle forms deviate from the general typological properties of the verb inflection, the change seems propelled by a more general shift in the internal relations of persons. However, the degree of deviation from the typological properties influences the rate of change in individual categories of the first person singular. The other problem discussed here is the development of the first person plural forms, where spontaneous change adds -ustum and - unstum to the set of older endings -unt and -ust in the early 17th century. The suffixation of -um following the middle -st goes against the claim of Wurzel (1984) that language-specific typological properties are always more powerful than universal tendencies. When -ustum has reached predomi­nance in the colloquial language around 1900, the puristic norm achieves its gradual replacement by -umst, revived from the old language by Árni Magnússon around 1700.