Jóhanna Barðdal – författare

Pulling together the threads of forty years of research on oblique subjects in the Germanic languages, this book introduces a novel approach to grammatical relations, based on a definition of subject as the first argument of the argument structure. New data are presented from Gothic, Old Saxon, Old Norse-Icelandic, Old Swedish and Old Danish, as well as from Icelandic, Faroese and German. This includes alternating Dat-Nom/Nom-Dat predicates, where either argument, the dative or the nominative, takes on subject behavior. The subject concept is modeled with the formalism of Construction Grammar, both synchronically and for the purpose of reconstructing grammatical relations for Proto-Germanic.

Pulling together the threads of forty years of research on oblique subjects in the Germanic languages, this book introduces a novel approach to grammatical relations, based on a definition of subject as the first argument of the argument structure. New data are presented from Gothic, Old Saxon, Old Norse-Icelandic, Old Swedish and Old Danish, as well as from Icelandic, Faroese and German. This includes alternating Dat-Nom/Nom-Dat predicates, where either argument, the dative or the nominative, takes on subject behavior. The subject concept is modeled with the formalism of Construction Grammar, both synchronically and for the purpose of reconstructing grammatical relations for Proto-Germanic.

Along with a renewed interest in the empirical foundations of linguistics, the increasing accessibility of large-scale corpora has sparked a surge of corpus-linguistic work on the grammar of natural languages. Corpus-based methods enhance our knowledge and understanding of individual languages, and they are theoretically significant because they allow us to test complex hypotheses on empirical and reproducible data. Spread over six thematic sections, the fifteen case studies in this book reflect on how methodological challenges and decisions affect the corpus-based analysis of grammatical patterns. They cover a wide variety of phenomena (syntax, registers, learner language, morphology, productivity, multilingualism) under different frameworks, including construction grammar, discourse analysis, and generative grammar. The contributors discuss the respective methodological and theoretical issues, proposing innovative solutions for linguistics in the 21st century.