Þáttur málstöðlunar í afstöðu sagnar til neitunar í 19.aldar íslensku

„málsgreinir, sem mjer fannst eitthvert danskt óbragð að". . .

Abstract

The position of the finite verb with regard to e.g. negation, so-called verb movement, has figured prominently in the literature over the past decades. It has been argued that a morphologically rich language such as Icelandic requires verb movement (V2) and that the verb follows negation (V3) only as an exception. However, linguists have pointed out that during the period 1600–1850, such exceptions were more common than today and that the language of certain texts bear a resemblance to the language of a Danish speaker (Heycock & Wallenberg 2013).

A new study of two 19th-century corpora, newspapers/periodicals and private letters of people with various social backgrounds, supports this result in the public texts. However, V3 is more frequent in private letters than expected if characteristic of Danish influence on learned individuals, as often thought. After 1850 the frequency of V3 in newspapers/periodicals drops from around 45% to 10–15%, whereas in private letters V3 is stable around 10%. The question is posed whether the change is due to standardisation but it seems that the drop in frequency precedes efforts to oust V3, e.g. in Lærði skólinn college in Reykjavík. This casts doubt on such a hypothesis but more research is needed.