| Date |
Presenter |
Title & Abstract |
| Thu, Dec 16 |
Dr. Joan Maling Brandeis University, Linguistics Program Officer at the NSF, <Location: St John R11> <Time: noon - 1:15> |
From Passive to Active: syntactic change in progress in Icelandic
I
will discuss the results of an extensive study of a syntactic change
currently underway in Iceland. This study was conducted with Sigríđur Sigurjónsdóttir, University of Iceland, and the
results were reported in Íslenskt mál; the English version,
“The ‘new impersonal’ construction in Icelandic,” appeared in J.
Comparative Germanic Linguistics 5:97-142 (2002). The new construction,
illustrated in (1a), appears to contain a passive auxiliary and a passive
participle which is able to assign accusative case to a postverbal
argument (Note that the expletive in (1a) is not a grammatical subject,
and occurs in declarative clauses only as needed to satisfy the
verb-second constraint). (1) a. Ţađ var beđiđ mig ađ vaska upp. Innovative Construction itEXPL was asked-neut.sg. me.ACC to wash up ‘I was asked to do the dishes’ or ‘they asked me to do the dishes’ b. Ég var beđinn ađ vaska upp. Canonical passive I was asked-masc.sg to wash up
‘I was asked to do the dishes’ In
the fall and winter of 1999-2000, we distributed a questionnaire to 1,731
tenth-graders (age 15-16) in 65 schools throughout Iceland; this number
represents 45% of the 3861 tenth-graders who took the national exams in
the spring of 2000. The questionnaire was also given to 205 adult controls
in various parts of the country. The
study was designed to track the development of this ongoing change and to
test the hypothesis that the innovative construction in fact involves the
reanalysis of a construction with passive morphology as a syntactically
active construction with a null impersonal subject.
Our study documented the widespread acceptance of the innovative
constructive everywhere throughout Iceland with the exception of the
innermost areas of Reykjavík. Adolescents in Inner Reykjavík were only
half as likely to accept the new construction as adolescents in the rest
of the country. I
begin by observing that we cannot always rely on surface morphology to
identify grammatical voice. Verbal morphology can be ambiguous between
passive and active voice, as illustrated by the italicized verb forms in
(2), taken from two Jane Austen novels, published in 1818. (2)
a. “The clock struck ten
while the trunks were carrying down.”
(Jane Austen) b.
“She only came
on foot, to leave more room for the harp, which was bringing in the
carriage.”
Until
the 19th century, a verb phrase could contain only one
auxiliary be; as a result, progressive passives like “were
being carried” were ungrammatical. If we cannot rely on surface
morphological properties, we need to develop syntactic diagnostics to
distinguish between two possible analyses of the new construction.
(3) Two Hypotheses a. [IP e [I Tns,Agr,Pass] [VP V NP]] Passive w/o NP-movement
b. [IP pro [I
Tns,Agr] [VP V NP]]
Active Impersonal The
[e] in (3a) denotes an empty subject position; the pro in (3b)
denotes the phonologically null counterpart to the overt impersonal
pronoun on in French. This
pro is [+human], bears the thematic role assigned by the verb to
its subject argument, and can therefore serve as antecedent for a bound
anaphor. Four syntactic criteria are identified which distinguish between
active and passive voice constructions: (i) occurrence of an agentive
by-phrase; (ii) occurrence of bound anaphors; (iii) occurrence of
subject-oriented participial adjuncts; and (iv) occurrence of
“unaccusative” (nonagentive) verbs.
This
on-going syntactic change in Icelandic parallels the completed development
of the -no/to construction in Polish and the autonomous form in
Irish. Despite its historical
origin as a morphological passive, the innovative -no/to construction
in Polish behaves syntactically like French on-sentences except
that the impersonal pronoun subject is null.
On the other hand, the Ukrainian -no/to construction, which
is cognate with the Polish construction, and which shares the superficial
morphological properties of accusative case and the consequent lack of
agreement, has diametrically opposite behavior for each of these four
syntactic criteria. The
obvious question, then, is this: which of the two polar opposites does the
innovative Icelandic construction most resemble? I discuss the results of
our survey with respect to the four syntactic criteria, and speculate on
why this change is occurring in Icelandic but not in any of the other
Germanic languages.
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