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Papers by Thorhallur Eythorsson

John Benjamins eBooks, 2018

Indogermanische Forschungen, Sep 26, 2017

Milli Mála, 2012

In the wake of the Crash figurative language has been used extensively in Icelandic. In fact, the... more In the wake of the Crash figurative language has been used extensively in Icelandic. In fact, the word crash itself about the economic depression is an example of a particular kind of figurative language known as metaphor. Metaphor is a characteristic of poetry but it is also very common in everyday speech. Many scholars think that metaphor is more important for the understanding of the nature of thought and language than often assumed. This article discusses theories on metaphor which play a crucial role in cognitive studies (Lakoff and Johnson 1980, Lakoff 1987) and critical responses to them (Pinker 2007). Keywords: metaphor, language, thought, cognitive studies, linguistics

Elsevier eBooks, 2006

Old Norse is a medieval North Germanic language attested in Norway and Iceland. Most of the evide... more Old Norse is a medieval North Germanic language attested in Norway and Iceland. Most of the evidence comes from texts that were written and preserved in Iceland. Modern Icelandic is closer to Old Norse than any other modern Nordic language. Nevertheless, numerous innovations have taken place in Icelandic, mostly affecting its phonology and syntax rather than its morphology. Among interesting linguistic features are preaspirated stops, oblique subjects, stylistic fronting, and symmetric verb-second. In accordance with the policy of language purism in Iceland, neologisms are created for new concepts rather than borrowing words from other languages. The ancient system of patronymics has been preserved.

Oslo Studies in Language, Jan 21, 2021

Studies in language companion series, Oct 9, 2018

Oxford University Press eBooks, Mar 25, 2020

This chapter studies varieties of “dependent V2” with “broad” (bDV2) and “narrow” (nDV2) distribu... more This chapter studies varieties of “dependent V2” with “broad” (bDV2) and “narrow” (nDV2) distribution—that is, “generalized” and “limited embedded V2”— arising within Icelandic. This pattern is taken to correlate with construals of verbal mood as “dominant” in the former case and “non-dominant” in the latter case, where dominance of verbal mood allows the disregarding of the illocutionary impact of V2. It further shows that the variation fits into a model of historical stages with earlier variants “recruiting” verbal mood for clause combining and drift in later stages towards “autonomous” mood, that is, towards a mood system with enhanced semantico-pragmatic transparency.

Veleia, Dec 13, 2016

Interest in syntactic reconstruction was implicit in the work of the founding fathers of the Comp... more Interest in syntactic reconstruction was implicit in the work of the founding fathers of the Comparative Method, including Franz Bopp and his contemporaries. The Neo-Grammarians took a more active interest in syntactic issues, concentrating especially on comparative descriptive syntax. In the 20th century, typologically-inspired research gave rise to several reconstructions of neutral word order for Proto-Indo-European. This work was met with severe criticism by Watkins (1976), which had the unfortunate effect that work on syntactic reconstruction reached a methodological impasse and was largely abandoned. However, the pioneering work of Hale (1987a), Garrett (1990) and Harris & Campbell (1995) showed that syntactic reconstruction could be carried out successfully. Currently, three different strands of work on syntactic reconstruction can be identified: i) the traditional Indo-Europeanists, ii) the generativists, and iii) the construction grammarians. The reconstructions of the two first strands are incomplete, either due to lack of formal representation, or due to the inability of the representational system to explicate the details of the form-meaning correspondences underlying any analysis of syntactic reconstruction. In contrast, Construction Grammar has at its disposal a full-fledged representational formalism where all aspects of grammar can be made explicit, hence allowing for the precise formulations of form-meaning correspondences needed to carry out a complete reconstruction. This is exemplified in the present paper with a reconstruction of grammatical relations for Proto-Germanic, involving a set of argument structure constructions and the subject tests applicable in the grammar of the proto-stage.

Constructions and frames, Jul 3, 2019

A long-standing divide between Icelandic and German in the literature takes for granted that ther... more A long-standing divide between Icelandic and German in the literature takes for granted that there are non-nominative subjects in Icelandic, while corresponding arguments in German have been analyzed as objects (Zaenen et al. 1985;Sigurðsson 1989). This is based on two differences between these languages: (a) differences with regard to control and conjunction reduction and (b) apparent subject behavior of the nominative indat-nomconstructions in German. This article focuses on the latter, introducing into the discussion the concept of alternating predicates, that is,dat-nompredicates that systematically alternate between two diametrically-opposed argument structure constructions,dat-nomandnom-dat. A comparison between Icelandic and German shows that Icelandicdat-nompredicates are of two types, a non-alternatinglíkatype and an alternatingfalla í geðtype, whereas German seems to exhibit only the alternating type. On this assumption, the apparent subject behavior of the nominative in German is easily explained, since such occurrences in fact involve thenom-datconstruction and not thedat-nomconstruction. Therefore, the subject behavior of the nominative innom-datconstructions does not invalidate a subject analysis of the dative indat-nomconstructions in German. The analysis is couched in the framework of construction grammar.

Studies in Germanic linguistics, Jul 18, 2017

BRILL eBooks, Jun 11, 2020

Veleia

El interés por la reconstrucción sintáctica estaba presente en la obra de los padres fundadores d... more El interés por la reconstrucción sintáctica estaba presente en la obra de los padres fundadores del Método Comparativo, incluidos Franz Bopp y sus contemporáneos. Los neogramáticos retomaron este interés por las cuestiones sintácticas, y se centraron especialmente en la sintaxis descriptiva comparada. En el siglo xx, la investigación de corte tipológico dio lugar a varias propuestas de reconstrucción de un orden de palabras no marcado. Esta labor encontró la oposición crítica de Watkins (1976), lo cual tuvo la desafortunada consecuencia de que el trabajo en reconstrucción lingüística fue prácticamente abandonado. Sin embargo, los trabajos pioneros de Hale (1987a), Garrett (1990) y Harris & Campbell (1995) mostraron que la reconstrucción sintáctica podía ser abordada de modo satisfactorio. A día de hoy, la reconstrucción sintáctica se lleva a cabo en tres corrientes lingüísticas: (i) la indoeuropeística tradicional, (ii) la lingüística formal-generativa, (iii) la gramática de constru...

Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today, 2019

Linguistics, 2015

The diachrony of valency patterns is generally an understudied phenomenon. The present article in... more The diachrony of valency patterns is generally an understudied phenomenon. The present article investigates anticausativization from a diachronic perspective, highlighting the parameters determining the morphosyntactic encoding of this type of intransitivization in two early Western Indo-European languages, Latin and Old Norse-Icelandic. It is shown that the structural and lexical aspects of a verb’s meaning and their interplay with the inherent and relational characteristics of verbal arguments affect the synchronic distribution and the diachronic development of the anticausativation strategies in the languages investigated. These features interact, in the course of time, with changes in the encoding of voice and grammatical relations, such as the demise of the synthetic mediopassive and the recasting of the case system.

Nordic Journal of Linguistics, 2012

This article investigates the morphosyntactic status of dative case in Norwegian, Icelandic, and ... more This article investigates the morphosyntactic status of dative case in Norwegian, Icelandic, and Faroese. We hypothesize that these three languages represent three diachronic stages signalled synchronically by the degree of preservation or non-preservation of dative under movement. Thus, we explore the synchronic status of dative under passive movement and topicalization in the three languages, while simultaneously paying attention to the larger questions of diachronic preservation and non-preservation of dative. We suggest that our findings have interesting ramifications for the categorization of case as structural and non-structural in generative grammar.

The goal of this paper is to provide a diachronic perspective on Verb-Second (V2) in Germanic. Th... more The goal of this paper is to provide a diachronic perspective on Verb-Second (V2) in Germanic. The take-home message is twofold:(1) equating V2 with V-to-C is a misnomer and (2) the canonical instances of alleged verb movement to I (or alternatively to a position in an extended CP structure) in embedded clauses in languages like Icelandic actually involve V2. It appears that in the earliest Germanic a conspiracy of various “operators” triggered verb movement to C in certain clause types (see Kiparsky 1994, Eythórsson ...

Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today, 2008