Ditransitives in Insular Scandinavian is a three year project (2019-2021) financed by the Icelandic Research Fund. The project has two principal investigators, Cherlon Ussery (associate professor at Carleton College) and Jóhannes Gísli Jónsson (professor at the University of Iceland). The objective is to explore issues relating to ditransitive verbs in Insular Scandinavian.
We will focus on three main issues: (a) inversion of the two objects (DO-IO orders in active clauses and theme passives), (b) the morphosyntax of ditransititve verbs (different cases and DPs vs. PPs) and related syntactic issues, and (c) the scope possibilites for the internal arguments of ditransitive verbs. These issues will be explored through various experimental methods and searches in corpora of natural speech.
Icelandic and Faroese provide an interesting point of comparison because the two languages share a case system where dative is the ususal case for indirect objects and accusative for direct objects, but they also diverge in that Faroese has lost many of the case patterns available for ditransitives in Icelandic and is also in the process of developing a DP-PP construction with verbs of caused possession.
Our study will make use of the extant theoretical literature to explain the data from Insular Scandinavian under investigation. We will also show how the data are relevant for the assessment of various analyses that have been advanced to account for ditransitives in English and other languages. These analyses concern e.g. the structure of the DP-DP construction, scope possibilities, and the relationship between the DP-DP construction and the DP-PP construction (Bruening 2018; Ormazabal & Romero 2012, Hallman 2015, Harley & Jung 2015).