"It is me" – the replacement of the nominative by the oblique form in Danish subject complements. Issue 1 (2nd January 2018)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Jensen, Eva Skafte
• Is Part Of: Acta linguistica hafniensia. Volume 50:Issue 1(2018)
• Page Start: 52
• Page End: 72
• Publication Date: 2018-01-02
• Subjects: Pronominal case -- subject complements -- Danish -- language change -- case-poor languages -- case-rich languages -- information structure; Linguistics -- Periodicals; 410.5
• DOI: 10.1080/03740463.2018.1436414
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0374-0463

Abstract

Abstract: In this paper, it is suggested that the replacement of the nominative by the oblique form in Danish subject complements happened as a part of major structural changes taking place in Middle Danish. The major structural changes in question involve the shift from a case-rich to a case-poor language in Early Middle Danish/Late Middle Danish, and the changing of the status of the subject of the sentence in Late Middle Danish/Early Modern Danish. As one outcome, the distribution of the case forms of personal pronouns changed from being primarily following the traditional syntactic-semantic principle of conveying semantic roles and syntactic functions to following principles pertaining to information structure with notions like theme and rheme, prominence and focus/anti-focus. The approach is functional-structural.