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We discuss remarkable constructions in Icelandic that have the distributive pronoun hvor ‘each’ in common: the reciprocal construction hvor annar ‘each other’, and the distributive construction hvor sinn ‘each their’, which also comes in a sinn hvor ‘their each’ version. We provide the first detailed description of these constructions, in particular their case and word order properties, which raise recalcitrant puzzles, and then we discuss what they say about the syntax of nonfinite verbs. Specifically, the word order and case properties of these constructions indicate that nonfinite verbs in Icelandic undergo short verb movement within the verb phrase. That is, the evidence indicates that the leftmost element in these constructions, alternatively hvor or sinn, originates inside an object DP and moves, by what we call e-raising, to the base position of an antecedent with which it agrees, before being stranded by that very antecedent. Nevertheless, the verb appears to the left of this element, even when it is a nonfinite verb, showing that it must undergo short movement to the left of Spec,vP. In addition, the interaction of e-raising and case has important consequences for Case theory, as it indicates that case agreement and case marking take place in PF.

The goal of this article is to understand the syntax of Icelandic indirect causatives (ICs), especially with respect to the implicit causee. We show that the complement of the causative verb must be at least as large as a VoiceP, and that it shares some properties with active VoicePs and others with passive VoicePs. We make sense of this state of affairs by proposing that the causee, while phonetically silent, has an explicit syntactic representation, but as a φP rather than a DP. We further propose that ICs are built by stacking a second VoiceP on top of the lexical verb’s first VoiceP, and that this configuration, along with the underspecified interpretation of φP, leads to a special thematic interpretation of both the causer and the implicit causee. Our analysis suggests that there are certain core ingredients involved in building ICs—such as stacked VoicePs and an underspecified causee—but that the source of these ingredients can vary across languages and constructions, depending on the formal primitives that grammars make available to the languages more generally.

This article discusses a somewhat peculiar “agreement” in Icelandic. In (i) we see such an agreement between the subject, on the one hand, and the finite verb and the predicate, on the other. (i) Englar alheimsins er komin út á ensku. angels.masc.pl of.the.universe is.sg published.fem.sg in English ‘Angels of the Universe has been published in English.’ Interestingly, the head of the subject is in the masculine plural while the finite verb is in the singular and the predicate in the feminine singular. Normally we would have expected the agreement to be as shown in (ii), with the verb and the predicate in the plural and the gender on the latter to be masculine. (ii) Eru englar ódauðlegir? are.pl angels.masc.pl immortal.masc.pl ‘Are angels immortal?’ What is crucial for the agreement pattern in (i), however, is that Englar alheimsins is the title of a book. Even though the noun bók ‘book’ is not visible it seems to directly affect the agreement. In fact, we argue in the article that the structure in examples like (i) contains a concealed or elided noun with which finite verbs, predicates, attributive adjectives, etc., can agree. Such nouns are often found in noun phrases that signify, e.g., titles or proper names that are fairly long, and also in noun phrases that contain foreign words that do not inflect, such as Liverpool or Radiohead. We compare this type of agreement with semantic agreement, such as in (iii), and so-called restaurant talk, as in (iv) (iii) Krakkarnir eru þreytt. the.kids.masc.pl are tired.neut.pl ‘The kids are tired.’ (iv) Ég keypti tvo kaffi. I bought two.masc coffee.neut ‘I bought two cups of coffee.’ We conclude that the agreement of the type in (i) resembles restaurant talk which also seems to involve a concealed noun. We do not, however, argue that semantic agreement contains a concealed noun.

In this article, we take a detailed look at clausal ellipsis in Icelandic, a hitherto understudied phenomenon. We focus on case-matching and case-mismatching facts in fragment responses. We argue that although case matching is the norm, constrained instances of casemismatching strongly suggest that there must be silent structure in the ellipsis site, and some syntactic identity condition. We outline these patterns in detail, and provide an analysis that assumes a post-syntactic approach to case marking, and a hybrid identity condition along the lines of Chung (2013).

This squib discusses the clitic DU (-du/-ðu/-tu) in Icelandic and compares it with other reduced forms of personal pronouns, such as’ann(forhann‘he’) and’ún(forhún‘she’). We show that there are various restrictions found on DU which are not found on other reduced forms of personal pronouns in Icelandic. We argue that whereas reduced forms such as’annand ’únare morphophonologically conditioned, DU is syntactically conditioned; it is not only clause-bounded but also phase-bounded.

Attributive compounds are words that include two parts, a head and a non-head, both of which include lexical roots, and in which the non-head is interpreted as a modifier of the head. The nature of this modification is sometimes described in terms of a covert relationship R. The nature of R has been the subject of much discussion in the literature, including proposals that a finite and limited number of interpretive options are available for R, as well as analyses in which the interpretation of R is unrestricted and varies with context. The modification relationship between the parts of an attributive compound also contrasts with the interpretation of compounds in other ways because some non-heads in compounds saturate argument positions of the head, others are semantically conjoined with them, and some restrict their domain of interpretation.

This paper discusses the use of ‘by’-phrases in Impersonal Passives in Icelandic. It has been claimed in the literature on Icelandic syntax that ‘by’-phrases that express the agent are not very good or even ungrammatical in Impersonal Passives. The pa-per shows that this point of view oversimplifies the facts because various examples of this pattern can be found in natural data and these examples do not seem to reflect mistakes in linguistic performance. We discuss examples from the Icelandic treebank and from the web and we suggest that ‘by’-phrases are more likely to be used in Impersonal Passives if they involve new information and/or if they are heavy. One of the conclusions of the article is that large and well annotated corpora are important for linguistic research that focuses on rare constructions.

The analysis of ‘get’-passives across Germanic poses a number of challenges to our understanding of valency alternations: they exhibit surprising case alternations and recalcitrant thematic properties (Alexiadou 2012, Alexiadou, Anagnostopoulou & Sevdali to appear). In this article, we present novel data on ‘get’-passives in Icelandic; while Icelandic has played an important role in our understanding of case marking and valency alternations, ‘get’-passives have not, to our knowledge, been studied in this language before. By situating ‘get’-passives within the landscape of well-established case patterns of Icelandic, we are able to argue in favor of the following conclusions: (i) Icelandic ‘get’-passives involve unambiguously verbal passives; (ii) the surface subject of recipient ‘get’-passives (‘I got a letter sent to me’) does not originate as the dative indirect object of the passive participle, but rather originates as an (external) argument of ‘get’; and (iii) at least some intransitive ‘get’-passives (‘This got changed’) involve anticausativization of the corresponding causative ‘get’-passive (‘I got this changed’), as proposed for English by Haegeman (1985).

Dative case on indirect objects (IO) in Lithuanian is preserved under passivization, which is not the case with dative direct objects (DO) of monotransitive verbs, suggesting that the two datives are not alike. Although DAT-to-NOM conversion is taken as an indicator of structural case, we show that DO datives behave differently from DOs bearing structural accusative in that the former exhibit inherent case properties as well (see also Anderson 2015). We develop an account for the contrast between the two datives by using two types of derivational mechanisms: structure-building features, triggering Merge, and probe features, triggering Agree (Heck & Müller 2007; Müller 2010). This study demonstrates that structural vs. non-structural conversion can be dependent on not only how case is assigned but also on the Voice system of a language (in line with Alexiadou et al. 2014). We argue that the DO dative in Lithuanian is in fact non-structural. Even though the result of DAT-to-NOM conversion is structural nominative case, the derivation is different from that of structural ACC-to-NOM conversion.

The primary goal of this chapter is to refine our understanding of the role of finite-verb agreement in pronoun-antecedent relations. It turns out that plural imposters such as “the undersigned and John” trigger first person agreement more easily than singular imposters such as “the undersigned,” and that finite verb agreement plays a surprising role in constraining pronoun-antecedent relations. If an imposter such as “the undersigned and John” triggers third person agreement, it can antecede a first or a third person pronoun in an embedded clause; but if that same imposter triggers first person agreement, then it can only antecede a first person pronoun. This state of affairs suggests that pronouns have a syntactic relation with their antecedent, a relation that is proposed to be mediated by one or more silent functional heads, such as the “context linkers” proposed in H.Á. Sigurðsson (2004, 2010, 2011).

We present an overview of an ongoing project which has the aim of developing methods for building a treebank of Icelandic. The treebank will contain both written and spoken language, and in addition have a diachronic dimension. Since Icelandic is an example of what has been called a less-resourced language when it comes to computational linguistics and language technology, it is essential to utilize the limited resources available as economically and efficiently as possible. We emphasize the importance of open source software and the interplay between linguistic knowledge and technological skills. We describe the workflow in the construction of the treebank and show how the different software tools work together towards the final representation. Finally, we show how the treebank can be used in studying some well known phenomena in Icelandic syntax.