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Quirky subjects (also called "oblique subjects") are a linguistic phenomenon whereby certain verbs specify that their subjects are to be in a case other than the nominative.12
For example the English sentence "*Me like him" is (mostly, depending on the dialect) ungrammatical because the subject is ordinarily in the nominative. In many or most modern nominative-accusative languages this rule is inflexible, the subject is indeed in the nominative case, and almost all treat the subjects of all verbs the same. As an exception to this rule, Icelandic, which has been argued (but by no means proven, see German) to be the only language with quirky subjects,3 is of considerable interest to linguistics.
The quirky subject is also evident in German.citation needed As an example:original research? "Mir ist kalt" would translate into English as "I'm cold" (although it would still be grammatically correct to insert es, for instance "*Es ist mir kalt").citation needed
Old Swedish was another example of the quirky subject. Swedish-language verbs forced subjects to agree in person around the 15th century, the advent of modern Swedish. Agreement in number remained in written Swedish as late as the 20th century, though, even though all subject-verb agreement had disappeared in speech by the 17th century.2
See also
References
- ^ Rögnvaldsson, Eiríkur (1991). "Quirky Subjects in Old Icelandic", in Halldór Ármann Sigurðsson: Papers from the Twelfth Scandinavian Conference of Linguistics, 369-378..
- ^ a b Fischer, Susann (2004). "The diachronic relationship between quirky subjects and stylistic fronting", in Peri Bhaskararao; Karumuri V. Subbarao: Non-nominative Subjects. John Benjamins Publishing Company, 193–212. ISBN 9027229708.
- ^ Faarlund, Jan T. (2001). "The notion of oblique subject and its status in the history of Icelandic", in Jan T. Faarlund: Grammatical relations in change. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 99–135.
Further reading
- Fanselow, Gisbert (2002). "Quirky 'subjects' and other specifiers", in Dieter Wunderlich; Ingrid Kaufmann; Barbara Stiebels: More Than Words: A Festschrift for Dieter Wunderlich. Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 227–250. ISBN 3050037598.
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- This page was last modified on 15 October 2008, at 20:10.
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