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Booth, Hannah: Argument configurationality and discourse configurationality in Old Icelandic

Configurationality as a property of language has attracted much attention since early work (e.g. Hale 1982, 1983). More recently, a distinction has been made between two types of configurationality: (i) argument configurationality (AC), i.e. to what extent specific grammatical functions are associated with particular structural positions (Nordlinger 1998); (ii) discourse configurationality (DC), i.e. to what extent specific discourse functions are associated with certain positions (Kiss 1995; Mycock 2006; Gazdik et al. 2011). In this paper, I discuss AC and DC in relation to Old Icelandic (c.1150-1350) from an LFG perspective. LFG’s parallel architecture is well suited for studying AC and DC, allowing the two to be independently modelled: AC can be handled in terms of the correspondence between c-structure positions and GFs at f-structure, while DC can be captured in terms of c- to i-structure correspondences. Using corpus data from the IcePaHC corpus (Wallenberg et al. 2011) I examine the status of Old Icelandic with respect to AC and DC and make three specific claims. Firstly, I argue that Old Icelandic exhibits a mixture of endocentric and exocentric structures at c-structure, and that there is positive evidence for there being no VP-constituent, besides the negative evidence provided by Faarlund (1990). Secondly, I argue that Old Icelandic is at least somewhat non-argument-configurational in the sense that grammatical functions are not identified on the basis of c-structure positions. Thirdly, I claim that Old Icelandic exhibits some level of DC, since there is evidence for a c-structure position in the midfield which is exclusively associated with (a particular type of) topic.


December 22, 2022
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