Abstract
The partitive genitive is commonly used across Germanic to express the whole in part-whole relationships. In Modern Icelandic, for example, einn þeirra 'one of them' involves the genitive plural þeirra 'of them' which marks the superset of which einn 'one' is a subset. In older Germanic, the partitive genitive occurred in interrogative constructions, where an interrogative pronoun in the neuter singular preceded the partitive genitive complement, like Old Icelandic hvat manna, lit. 'what of men'. This interrogative partitive construction could question the subset's identity, quantity, or quality. Though the construction has previously been discussed for Old English (van Gelderen 2021) and historical German (Blümel & Coniglio 2019; Hobich 2024), North Germanic has been largely overlooked. In this talk, I present novel data on the interrogative partitive in Old Icelandic and suggest a syntax involving a silent nominal element whose determiner is the neuter, singular interrogative hvat, and whose complement is the partitive noun. Unlike the previously studied languages, Old Icelandic interrogative partitives are not restricted to the genitive case: depending on their semantics, they also occur in the dative. In addition to proposing an analysis of these Old Icelandic partitives, I discuss their diachronic development into Modern Icelandic. I propose that the bare oblique case-marking found in Old Icelandic gradually gives way to a prepositionally assigned oblique case-marking. In particular, I argue that the qualitative partitive introduces the preposition at 'to,' which cliticizes onto the interrogative pronoun hvat 'what,' grammaticalizes, and ultimately yields the Modern Icelandic wh-determiner hvaða 'which, what kind of.'
Bio
Hrefna Svavarsdóttir graduated with a BA in Icelandic studies from the University of Iceland in 2023. She was a teaching assistant and visiting student in the Department of Linguistics at Cornell University in 2023–2024. Since fall 2024, Hrefna has been a PhD student in the Department of Linguistics at Harvard University. Her research interests include syntactic and morphological variation and change, employing methods from both historical and theoretical linguistics.