The semantics of the impersonal construction in Icelandic, German and Faroese: beyond thematic roles

Barðdal, Jóhanna

doi:10.1524/9783050084336.105

Cited by 29 publications

(52 citation statements)

References 11 publications

(18 reference statements)

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“…So if anything, it is the speaker who is the experiencer here. On the basis of data like these, I have argued elsewhere (Barðdal 2004) that two levels of relations need to be assumed: a) a level including the semantic relation holding between the referent denoted by the logical subject and the "event" denoted by the predicate (the semi-factual level) b) a level including the empathic relation holding between the speaker and his/her attitudes towards the content of the proposition encoded in the utterance (the subjective level)…”

Section: Lexical Vs Structural Casementioning

confidence: 99%

Lexical vs. structural case: a false dichotomy

Barðdal

2010

Morphology

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Abstract:This article takes issue with the two dichotomies of structural vs. lexical case and thematic vs. idiosyncratic case, on the basis of their predictions on: a) synchronic productivity, b) language change, and c) language acquisition. It is shown here that these predictions are not borne out in Icelandic. In fact, productivity data from Icelandic suggest that accusative objects to new verbs are assigned lexically and not structurally. Another problem is presented by different changes in case marking in the history of the Germanic languages, changes that can only be captured by two complementary approaches to structural case, which in turn severely undermines the general explanatory power of this concept. It turns out, moreover, that the case preservation property of lexical case, as opposed to structural case, in passives and raising-to-object constructions, is a construction-specific property, not generalizable to the language as a whole. An alternative approach is sketched in terms of a usage-based construction grammar where all case marking of core arguments in Icelandic is regarded as lexical, i.e. word-bound, and modeled in terms of lexicality-schematicity hierarchies which capture verb-specific idiosyncrasies, higher-level generalizations, as well as the default status effect found for the Nom-Acc construction.

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Section: Lexical Vs Structural Casementioning

confidence: 99%

Lexical vs. structural case: a false dichotomy

Barðdal

2010

Morphology

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“…More particularly, as pointed out by Langacker (1991: 409-413), and emphasized by Smith (2001) and Barðdal (2004), since accusatives and datives are typically used to mark objects of transitive verbs, these case markers denote affectedness to a much higher degree than nominatives. Hence, the use of an oblique case to mark the protagonist of the GER+(NOM+)DAT construction is motivated by the modal meaning of the construction, the lack of agentive properties of the protagonist, and the construction's low degree of transitivity.…”

Section: 2mentioning

confidence: 96%

“…It is generally well known in the literature that non-canonical case marking is connected with a low degree of transitivity, cf. Shibatani (1985), Tsunoda (1985), Onishi (2001), Barðdal (2004), Barðdal & Eythórsson (2009), Narrog (2010, and Danesi (2014).…”

Section: 2mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The dative subject construction in several Indo-European languages has recently been the subject of a large-scale comparison, carried out by Barðdal (2004Barðdal ( , 2006Barðdal ( , 2008, and Barðdal et al (2012Barðdal et al ( , 2013Barðdal et al ( , 2016. One of their major findings is that that the predicates instantiating this construction are not confined to experiencer subjects, as the "typological dative" is assumed to be, but covers instead five different semantic fields.…”

Section: 2mentioning

confidence: 99%

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Between the historical languages and the reconstructed language

Danesi¹,

Johnson²,

Barðdal³

2017

Indogermanische Forschungen

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It is argued by Hettrich (1990) that the "dative of agent" construction in the IndoEuropean languages most likely continues a construction inherited from ProtoIndo-European. In two recent proposals (Danesi 2013, Luraghi 2016, it is argued that the "dative of agent" contains no agent at all, although the two proposals differ with regard to the reconstructability of the "dative of agent" construction. Luraghi argues that it is an independent secondary development from an original beneficiary function (cf. Hettrich 1990), while Danesi maintains that the construction is reconstructable for an earlier proto-stage. Elaborating on Danesi's approach, we analyze gerundives with the "dative of agent" in six different IndoEuropean languages that bridge the east-west divide, namely, Sanskrit, Avestan, Ancient Greek, Latin, Tocharian, and Lithuanian. Scrutiny of the data reveals similarities at a morphosyntactic level, a semantic level (i.e. modal meaning and low degree of transitivity), and also, to some extent, at an etymological level. An analysis involving a modal reading of the predicate, with a dative subject and a nominative object, is better equipped to account for the particulars of the "gerundive + nominative + dative" construction than the traditional agentive/passive analysis. The proposal is couched within the theoretical framework of Construction Grammar, in which the basic unit of language is the Construction, i.e. a form-function correspondence, and no principled distinction between lexical items and complex syntactic structures is assumed. As these structures are by definition units of comparanda, required by the Comparative Method, they can be successfully utilized in the reconstruction of a protoconstruction for Proto-Indo-European.

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“…1 As shown by Barðdal (2004), in her comparative study of Modern Icelandic, Modern Faroese and Modern High German, this is an oversimplification, and several dative-subject predicates in Modern Icelandic are neither experiencer nor benefactive predicates, but denote some sort of non-volitional, often accidental, events, here referred to as HAPPENSTANCE events. The same is true for Modern Faroese and Modern German, although there are fewer happenstance predicates in those languages than in Modern Icelandic.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Reconstructing constructional semantics

Barðdal

Smitherman

Bjarnadóttir³

et al. 2012

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Abstract:As the historical linguistic community is well aware, reconstructing semantics is a notoriously difficult undertaking. Such reconstruction has so far mostly been carried out on lexical items, like words and morphemes, and has not been conducted for larger and more complex linguistic units, which intuitively seems to be a more intricate task, especially given the lack of methodological criteria and guidelines within the field. This follows directly from the fact that most current theoretical frameworks are not construction based, that is, they do not assume that constructions are form-meaning correspondences. In order to meet this challenge, we present an attempt at reconstructing constructional semantics, more precisely the semantics of the Dative Subject Construction for an earlier stage of Indo-European. For this purpose we employ lexical semantic verb classes in combination with the semantic map model (Barðdal 2007, Barðdal, Kristoffersen & Sveen 2011, showing how incredibly stable semantic fields may remain across long time spans, and how reconstructing such semantic fields may be accomplished.

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The semantics of the impersonal construction in Icelandic, German and Faroese: beyond thematic roles

Cited by 29 publications

References 11 publications

Lexical vs. structural case: a false dichotomy

Lexical vs. structural case: a false dichotomy

Between the historical languages and the reconstructed language

Reconstructing constructional semantics

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