Expletives in Icelandic : a corpus study

Various claims have been made concerning expletives in historical Icelandic (Eythórsson & Sigurðardóttir, 2016; Hróarsdóttir, 1998; Rögnvaldsson, 2002). However, previous studies are limited to certain centuries and/or text types. This paper assesses the status of expletives throughout all stages of attested Icelandic (1150–2008) using the Icelandic Parsed Historical Corpus (IcePaHC). The IcePaHC data indicates that the expletive is already attested in impersonal constructions in Old Icelandic, contra previous accounts. I also claim that þar ‘there’ was historically available as an expletive in presentational constructions and argue against a recent claim that the emergence of expletive það is a contact phenomenon. Strikingly, postfinite expletives are attested historically, which challenges the standard cross-Germanic account for the diachrony of expletives.

ISBN:9789027261670

Publication year:2020

Accessibility:Open