The Diachrony of Dative Subjects and the Middle in Icelandic: A Corpus Study

Icelandic is very well known for non-nominative subjects. In recent years, it has been proposed that dative subjects are a Proto-Indo European feature, and that a Dative Subject Construction has been inherited through the ages in the daughter language families (Barðdal and Eythórsson, 2009; Barðdal et al., 2012). We conduct a corpus study and show that while dative subjects can indeed already be found in the earliest attested Icelandic texts, their distribution has been changing over the last millenium. In particular, their use in middles has increased significantly. We explain our findings via an increased use of experiencer subjects combined with a more regular association of experiencer arguments with dative case. We provide a formal analysis within LFG's Mapping or Linking Theory that draws on Barron's (2001) analysis of the diachronic development of raising verbs in Latin. Overall, we see our work as providing evidence against dative subjects in Icelandic as being due to an inherited monolithic Dative Subject Construction.