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Syntactic Variation in Insular Scandinavian
Edited by Höskuldur Thráinsson, Caroline Heycock, Hjalmar P. Petersen and Zakaris Svabo Hansen
[Studies in Germanic Linguistics 1] 2017
► pp. 91–112

Determining the nature of intra-speaker subject case variation

Extensive syntactic surveys show that variation in subject case appears in both Insular Scandinavian languages. The results furthermore indicate that intra-speaker variation is widespread and that Person-Specific Retention (PSR) is one of the characteristics of the variation in both Icelandic and Faroese. Many questions on the nature of the variation remain unanswered and no formal account of the PSR has been provided. In this paper I shed light on the subject by presenting new data from Icelandic, Faroese and heritage North-American Icelandic. Experimental language acquisition data can be particularly decisive regarding the nature of the intra-speaker variation and the variation and PSR can be accounted for formally within Yang’s (2002, 2016) variational model of acquisition.

Keywords: language change, language acquisition, variation in subject case, Dative b-Substitution, variational learning framework, Tolerance Principle, Icelandic, heritage Icelandic, Faroese
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Previous studies: Major findings and unsolved problems
    • 2.1Distribution
      • 2.1.1Person-Specific Retention (PSR)
      • 2.1.2Mixed case marking (MCM)
    • 2.2Language acquisition
  • 3.Study
    • 3.1Methodology
      • 3.1.1Survey design
      • 3.1.2Additional data
  • 4.Results
    • 4.1Survey
      • 4.1.1The distribution of cases with langa
      • 4.1.2Accusative Substitution with finnast
    • 4.2Naturalistic data
      • 4.2.1Language sample corpus
      • 4.2.2Collected examples
  • 5.Analysis
    • 5.1Rules over words
    • 5.2Variable input and intra-speaker variation
      • 5.2.1First and second person singular accusative as a (productive) rule
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 18 July 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/sigl.1.04now
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WOOD, JIM, MATTHEW BARROS & EINAR FREYR SIGURÐSSON
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