Fall á fallanda fćti?
Útdráttur‘Case a lost case? On changes in subject case in Icelandic’Keywords: case marking, syntactic change, semantic roles, thematic roles, subject case, quirky case, impersonal constructions. This paper is partly a remark on the analysis of the relationship between non-nominative subjects and thematic roles in Icelandic offered by Jóhannes Gísli Jónsson (JGJ) in Íslenskt mál 19–20. The author agrees with the most of the main points made by JGJ, in particular the importance of distinguishing between structural case and lexical case and dividing lexical case into truly quirky (or irregular) case and regular (i.e. semantically or thematically motivated) lexical case. He argues, however, that the facts are somewhat more complex than JGJ assumes. In particular he points out that some verbs taking experiencer subjects have shown tendency to change the case of this subject from dative to nominative, especially in earlier Icelandic. He also argues that the changes “nominative sickness” (the tendency to replace (lexically assigned) non-nominative subjects by (structurally assigned) nominative ones) and “dative sickness” (the tendency to replace quirky accusative (or nominative in the case of verbs like hlakka ‘look forward to’ and kvíða ‘be apprehensive about’?) by dative as a subject case of verbs taking experiencer subjects) go to in opposite directions and are motivated by different underlying tendencies. As a result the former seems to have lost ground, as it were, when the latter became more common in recent times. | ||||
