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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. 113–140

Variation in dative in Faroese

The aim of this article is to investigate variation in object case marking in Faroese and the ongoing change from dative objects to accusative objects in Modern Faroese. In this investigation I try to determine what influences this change: Is it influenced by the morphological form of the noun phrase, the semantics of the verb, language contact with Danish or an interaction between these three factors? Furthermore it is necessary to see if synonymous Nom/Acc native verbs influence Nom/Dat verbs. To seek answers to these questions I conducted three different grammaticality judgment tests among young people, 17–20 years of age, in the Faroe Islands, and I have compared these data with the results of a search in a text database (teldni.fo/tekstasavn).

Keywords: language change, case loss, language contact, verb semantics, proto-agent, proto-patient, prototypical dative verbs, lexical diffusion
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Dative in Faroese – A short overview
  • 3.Method
  • 4.Does the variation depend on the form of the NP?
  • 5.Does the semantics of the verbs play a role?
  • 6.The case assignment of borrowed verbs
  • 7.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 18 July 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/sigl.1.05pet
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