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This paper is an examination of how stories shared as a result of the #metoo movement in Iceland exemplify aspects of how culture and institutions in Iceland are complicit in the silencing of immigrant women who experience violence, both in intimate partner and employment situations. Through a critical analysis of 10 of the narratives shared by immigrant women in Iceland, the authors explore how testimonial smothering and silencing are both producing and reproducing epistemic violence in the women's lives. We argue that the focus on linguistic purity of the Icelandic language maintains these exclusionary practices. Recognition of hegemonic practices is important in the continued development of a more equitable society and a first step in the inclusion of diverse voices in the continued development of the diversifying Icelandic knowledge society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I argue in this paper for a novel analysis of case in Icelandic, with implications for case theory in general. I argue that structural case is the manifestation on the noun phrase of features which are semantically interpretable on verbal projections. Thus, Icelandic case does not encode features of noun phrase interpretation, but it is not uninterpretable either; case is properly seen as reflecting (interpretable) tense, aspect, or Aktionsart features. Accusative case in Icelandic is available when the two subevents introduced in a transitive verb phrase are temporally identified with each other, and dative case is available when the two parts are distinct. This analysis bears directly on the theory of feature checking in the Minimalist Program. Specifically, it is consistent with a restrictive theory of feature checking in which no features are strictly uninterpretable: all formal features come in interpretable- uninterpretable pairs, and feature checking is the matching of such pairs, driven by legibility conditions at Spell-Out. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In many languages the syllabification of intervocalic consonants has been shown to be influenced by the principle of onset maximization, whereby as many segments are assigned to the subsequent syllable as are phonotactically legal. Icelandic, however, has been repeatedly argued to follow a coda maximization strategy even though opinion has remained divided on this. This paper is an attempt to address this issue from the psycholinguistic perspective. The results of two experiments leave little doubt that the proper syllabification in Icelandic is onset maximization rather than coda maximization, thereby aligning Icelandic with many other languages and providing further support for the onset maximization principle. A number of other aspects were investigated, including the special status of certain two-consonant clusters, preaspiration and gemination. Clusters with a maximum sonority difference between their constituents were found to tend towards tautosyllabicity, whereas those with a smaller sonority difference gravitate towards heterosyllabicity. Furthermore, there is at least some evidence for the claim that both preaspiration and gemination lend themselves to an analysis in terms of a sequence of two identical consonants at the underlying level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents data from Modern Icelandic of a small group of Dat-Nom verbs which select for two arguments: a Dative human argument and a Nominative stimulus. When applying independently established subjecthood tests on these arguments it turns out that both pass the tests, i.e. both arguments can behave like subjects and like objects, but not at the same time. An examination of the lexical meanings of these predicates reveals that they can be divided into the following main groups: Emotive verbs, Perception Verbs, Cognition Verbs, Verbs of Attitude and Benefactive verbs. A Construction Grammar analysis is proposed, assuming two different syntactic constructions to exist in Icelandic, i.e. a Dat-Nom construction versus a Nom-Dat construction. It is argued that the occurrence of these predicates in the two constructions follows directly from their conceptual causal structure. Furthermore, the choice of subject seems to be contextually determined, i.e. the more topical argument takes on the subject function. The relation between the two constructions, i.e. the Dat-Nom and the Nom-Dat, seems to be like the relation between an ordinary transitive construction and its topicalization construction, in that when the lower argument is "topicalized" to first position the other construction is activated, hence the ordinary topicalization construction in Icelandic is not as readily available to these verbs as the other construction is. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Old Norse name of the thunder god has the monosyllabic form Þórr in the extant manuscripts. However, one Eddic poem, Hymiskviða, and one skaldic poem, Þórsdrápa, have verses which metrically indicate a disyllabic form with a short first syllable, hypothetically restored as *Þóarr, *Þóurr, *Þonarr or *Þunurr. The existence of such a disyllabic form has been dismissed by recent editors who have resorted to conjectural emendations for the line in Þórsdrápa and mostly ignored the problem in Hymiskviða. When the metrical question is examined in detail, it becomes apparent that there is a great deal of evidence for a disyllabic form. Crucially, Hymiskviða is demonstrably a metrically rigorous poem and both its occurrences of the name Þórr are consistent with a disyllabic form and inconsistent with a monosyllabic form. It is implausible that this is a coincidence. In this case, as in many others, Old Norse poems give us information about linguistic forms which had gone out of use long before the extant manuscripts were written. This is important testimony on the transmission and preservation not only of skaldic poetry but also of Eddic poetry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the rich array of clausal exclamatives in Icelandic. It is shown here that Icelandic has three kinds of simple exclamatives ( Wh-exclamatives, XP-exclamatives and M-exclamatives) as well as various combinations of these three types. A structural analysis of clausal exclamatives in Icelandic is proposed, according to which they involve up to three functional projections in the CP layer: ExclP (Exclamative Phrase), HDegP (High Degree Phrase) and WhP (Wh Phrase). Clausal exclamatives are also shown to fall into two groups with respect to the possibility of subject-verb inversion and the use of the complementizer sem. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]