Zero expression of arguments in Old Danish

Abstract

Old Scandinavian (represented here by the Scanic dialect of Old Danish) allowed zero arguments (null-arguments) in any nominal (argument) position, that is: for NPs as subjects, objects and in PPs. In generative grammar, zero arguments are held to be variants of pronouns, but in this article, I shall claim that zero arguments in Scanic are semantically different from pronouns, and therefore pronouns and zero arguments are not variants. At one level, zero arguments and pronouns are similar with respect to function, namely to supply means for establishing co-reference in text; however, they are not semantically equivalent. By reducing these two categories to one single underlying category, such as pro, one would miss this point. On the contrary, zero arguments are arguably full-bodied signs with their own content, thus corresponding to Melčuk's Zero Sign Introduction Principle (2006).

My analysis is intended as an example of the way Danish Functional Grammar unites a functional approach with important insights from European structuralism.

Keywords::

• zero arguments
• null-arguments
• pronouns
• anaphors
• definiteness
• bare nouns

Notes

¹ The central data will be taken from Skånske Lov, ‘The Scanic Law’, text from the early thirteenth century, manuscripts from 1250 and later. Stockholm B 69, from around 1350, is quoted unless otherwise indicated. This manuscripthas recently been shown to be more conservative with respect to case morphology than older manuscripts (Jensen 2011).

² It is normally held that Old Scandinavian cannot have deictic zero arguments, more specifically no null subjects in deictic contexts. Personally, I suspect this might be due to the character of the data. In the family saga Gísla saga Surssonar, Vésteinn is murdered in his sleep with a spear in a situation with absolutely no contextual speech for him to refer to. Yet his legendary dying words are: Hneit þar ‘(That) hit there’ with a null subject.

³ Strikingly, Faarlund (1990) holds a different view more in line with my own. Here he argued that Old Scandinavian was non-configurational and that consequently, it had null-arguments. These “will still be interpretable if the reference < referents? LH> of the empty arguments can still be recovered from the context”. (1990, 86)

⁴ One anonymous reviewer has called this example into question by analysing it as an instance of a floating quantifier. But discontinuous constituents are not restricted to quantifiers in Old Scandinavian. They are found with modifiers in general: adjectives, demonstratives, modifying quantifiers and modifying adverbials, relatively often in clause initial position: góðan eigum vér konung lit: good have we king, “We have a good king”; þeirrar skaltu konu biðja lit: this must you woman ask to marry, “This woman you should ask to marry” (Nygaard 1905, 355; see also Faarlund 2004, 236).

⁵ Similar uses of the nominative with no concord are found in Latin: ager rubricosus …, ibi lupinum bonum fiet lit.:“red-coloured soil, there will lupines turn out well” Blatt 1946, 65, see also Hofmann and Szantyr 1972, 29.

⁶ An extensive discussion of morphological zeroes is found in Peter Juul Nielsen (2012).

⁷ The reader is referred to Nygaard (1905, 355) and to Faarlund (2004, 232) for examples like eigi (neg) skorti þar áfenginn mjǫð ‘there was no shortage of strong mead there’; eigi (neg) drap ek bróður þínn ‘I did not kill your brother’. The passage about topicalisation in Faarlund (2004, 231–36) is typical of the use of ‘topic’ in Scandinavian generative grammar. The problem of referentiality is not discussed, however. Where information status is concerned, he rightly stresses that the CP-Spec position has no direct relation to distinctions such as old vs. new information.

⁸ Sigurðsson's example (8) is very similar, except that the coreferential problem is created by a metonymic reference.

⁹ These are: Stockholm B74, Stockholm B76, Stockholm B69, Stockholm B72, AM 28, AM 41, GkS 3121, Ledreborg 12, E Don Var. 136. Some late manuscripts from the sixteenth century onwards emend the text along this design: Haffuer han jord, da skall hand betalle med jord ‘has he land, then he must pay back in terms of land’. None have hana or hænne, or thæt.

¹⁰ For this metaphor as an illustration of language specific structure, see Harder 1996.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Lars Heltoft

Lars Heltoft is professor of Danish language and linguistics at Roskilde University, Denmark. He is co-author of Grammatik over det Danske Sprog [Grammar of the Danish Language] (2011; with Erik Hansen) and co-author of Connecting Grammaticalisation (John Benjamins 2011; with Jens Nørgård-Sørensen and Lene Schøsler). He has written numerous articles on grammaticalisation and Danish grammar.