Icelandic V3 orders with temporal adjuncts
Investigation into prosodic breaks and syntactic parsing
Abstract
Although Icelandic is a verb second language (V2), it sometimes allows for V3 orders. In this paper, I focus on a type of Icelandic V3 which consists of an adverbial adjunct occurring in front of wh-questions and present the results of a pilot study that investigated the effects of the length of prosodic break and clause type in relation to V3 structures. Participants were presented with an adverbial clause sandwiched between two sentences (A and B), of which the latter varied between a wh-question and a subject-initial sentence. The breaks between the adverbial and the sentences varied in length. The task was to judge which sentence (A or B) was longer, with the response reflecting which sentence the adverbial clause was parsed with. The results indicate that both the clause type of the B sentence and the length of the prosodic break between the adverbial and the B sentence had a significant effect on how the sentences were parsed.
- Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work (See The Effect of Open Access).
