The development of non-paradigmatic linking elements in Faroese and the decline of the genitive case

This paper focuses on the development of linking elements in Faroese. It aims to capture the whole dissociation process of the Faroese linking elements, which comprises the ongoing decline of the genitive case as well as the distributional, functional and formal changes within the linking system. The first part of the article deals with the development of the verbal, prepositional and attributive genitive in the history of Faroese. Based on existing corpus studies, we will present the strongly restricted use of the genitive in Contemporary Faroese: The genitive is not used as a verbal case at all. As a prepositional case it is limited to two prepositions (til ‘to’ and partly as a complement of (í)millum ‘between’). Genitive attributes expressing different semantic relations like possession or family relationship are no longer in use either – they are replaced by analytic constructions, e.g. hús-ini hjá gentu-n-i ‘house-def.nom./acc.pl by girl.nnom.sg-def-def.dat.sg’ ‘the girl’s house’. In the second part, the paper addresses the continuous development of linking elements, which originate from the genitive endings, e.g. dag-s verk ‘day-gen.sg work.nom.sg’ > dag+s+verk ‘day’s work’. Here, it will be shown that the contemporary linking system in Faroese comprises different stages of formal and functional development. The focus will then lie on the ongoing development of the non-paradigmatic linking elements, i.e. linkers which are no more homophonous with any inflectional ending of the noun. Of particular interest is the ongoing context-driven variation between the paradigmatic linker +ar+ and the non-paradigmatic +a+. An acceptability test with novel and nonsense compounds will show a preference for the non-paradigmatic variant +a+ instead of the paradigmatic +ar+ before obstruents, e.g. mjólk+a+pakki instead of mjólk+ar+pakki ‘milk carton’.