Chapter published in:
Possession in Languages of Europe and North and Central Asia
Edited by Lars Johanson, Lidia Federica Mazzitelli and Irina Nevskaya
[Studies in Language Companion Series 206] 2019
► pp. 267–289

A diachronic perspective on alienability splits in Icelandic attributive possession

| University of Bremen
Icelandic makes use of different morphosyntactic patterns for different kinds of possessive relations both in predicative and attributive possession. The fact that this differentiation is at least partly motivated by the semantics of the possessum suggests an alienability split in the Icelandic possession system (Stolz 2008). There are various approaches to explain the formal distinctions in the system, one of them depending on grammaticalization processes. Following this approach, a diachronic perspective needs to be taken in order to understand how splits arise. Accordingly, this paper presents the results of a corpus-linguistic and frequency-based analysis of the attributive pronominal possessive system of Icelandic. The most significant finding to emerge is that splits in the possessive system do not only manifest in a different synchronic behaviour but also in different degrees of susceptibility to language-internal and/or contact-induced changes.
Keywords: split possession, Icelandic, diachrony, grammaticalization, language contact
Published online: 05 March 2019
https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.206.13sch
References

Source texts (Icelandic Parsed Historical Corpus)

eintal Arngrímur Jónsson
(1593): Eintal sálarinnar við sjálfa sig.Google Scholar
indiafari Jón Ólafsson Indíafari
(1661): Reisubók Jóns Ólafssonar IndíafaraGoogle Scholar
jartein
Jarteinabækur þorláks helga ‘Miracle Collection of Bishop Þorlákr’ (1210)Google Scholar
leysing Jón Trausti
(i.e. Guðmundur Magnússon) (1907): Leysing: kaupstaðarsaga frá síðustu áratugum nítjándu aldar.Google Scholar
mamma Guðmund Andra Thorsson
(2008): Segðu mömmu að mér líði vel – saga um ástirGoogle Scholar
ofurefli Einar H. Kvaran
(1908): OfurefliGoogle Scholar
pislarsaga Jón Magnússon
(1659): Píslarsaga séra Jóns MagnússonarGoogle Scholar
sagan Pétur Gunnarsson
(1985): Sagan öllGoogle Scholar
skalholt
unknown author (1680-1700): Sögu-þáttur um Skálholts biskupa fyrir og um siðaskiptin.Google Scholar
thorlakur
unknown author (1200-1220): Þorláks saga helgaGoogle Scholar
vilhjalmur
unknown author (1450-1475): Vilhjálms saga SjóðsGoogle Scholar

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