Expletives in Icelandic

Booth, Hannah

doi:10.1075/cilt.350.17boo

Cited by 1 publication

(6 citation statements)

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“…For sake of time, I do not look beyond the tagged instances for overt or ‘null’ expletives which are not tagged as such in the corpus. However, a parallel manual investigation of expletives in Old Icelandic presented in Booth (2018) yielded comparable results to the IcePaHC findings for early texts, suggesting the IcePaHC tagging of expletives is reasonably reliable. Combining the overt and ‘null’ expletives gives a dataset which represents the total contexts in which the expletive could potentially occur (henceforth ‘expletive contexts’).…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 78%

“…This allows me to go beyond previous studies which only count the number of sentences where expletive það is present, without taking into account the overall number of contexts in which the expletive could plausibly occur (Hróarsdóttir 1998, Rögnvaldsson 2002). Impersonal constructions which qualify as expletive contexts were isolated via CorpusSearch queries (see Booth 2018 for details). To make the investigation manageable, I restrict the study to matrix clauses.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Sometimes það is tagged as an expletive (‘ES’), sometimes as a referential pronoun (‘PRO’), depending on the subject properties of the clause. A variety of CorpusSearch queries are therefore required in order to capture all examples of cataphoric það (see again Booth 2018). ‘Null’ instances of cataphoric það – contexts where it could be expected but is not attested – are also tagged.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Section 3 presents findings for the status of cataphoric það in various constructions types in the history of Icelandic and discusses a structurally ambiguous construction, using Lexical-Functional Grammar (LFG) for the formal analysis. Section 4 presents an account for the development whereby expletive það emerged on the model of earlier cataphoric contexts and compares this with previous findings for the rise of það in presentational constructions (Booth 2018). Section 5 concludes the paper.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 92%

“…Booth (2018) conducted a corpus-based study of IcePaHC examining the status of the expletive in presentational constructions. I display the findings for prefinite það in such contexts in Table 15.…”

Section: The Emergence Of the Expletivementioning

confidence: 99%

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Cataphora, expletives and impersonal constructions in the history of Icelandic

Booth

2019

Nord J Linguist

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This paper presents a diachronic account for the emergence of the expletive það in Icelandic impersonal constructions. Using data from the IcePaHC corpus (Wallenberg et al. 2011), I show that a cataphorically referential það functions as a topic position placeholder in Old Icelandic (1150-1350) in impersonals with a clausal argument. The corpus findings indicate that það spread from this early cataphoric context to impersonals which lack the clausal argument, with ‘say-type predicates’ acting as a bridging context. Strikingly, this coincides with another change whereby cataphoric það becomes increasingly restricted to the topic position in constructions with a clausal subject. I interpret this as evidence that cataphoric það is losing its subject status in such contexts and becoming a topic position placeholder, in line with its function in impersonals. This sheds light on the mixed status of cataphoric það in modern Icelandic and challenges the ‘Prefinite First Hypothesis’ for the diachrony of Germanic expletives (e.g. Faarlund 1990).

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Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 78%

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 92%

Section: The Emergence Of the Expletivementioning

confidence: 99%

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