Jaume Solà i Pujols - Departament de Filologia Catalana ...

eflexive, but rather the one used as anti-subject oriented reflexive (which is in fact a logophoric
pronoun in shape):
(74) Jón er ekki lengur hann sjálfur/*sig sjálfur
J. is not longer him SELF SE SELF
Since this is obviously a case of subject orientation, the facts are not expected. H.
Sigurdhsson (p.c.) pointed out to me that perhaps the problem is that sig cannot be used because
it lacks a nominative form. For all the other germanic languages we have been implicitly
assuming that sig selv/sich selbst/etc. are Nominative forms in the Anaphoric Copulative
Constructions. Then, why is Icelandic reluctant to use sig as Nominative?
I think there is a notable difference between Icelandic and Mainland Scandinavian,
English or French: in the latter, there are some Nominative pronominals that can only be used in
Spec of AGR position: 78
(75) a. He is sick
b. It is him/*he
c. Him/*he, he's a liar
In these languages, the so-called Nominative pronouns are special forms confined to
Spec of AGR. The forms usually taken to be non-Nominative are, I assume, unmarked. So let's
assume in these languages, by extension, even reflexive forms would be unmarked, and therefore
can be used as Nominative forms unproblematically. We could say that in some languages
having unmarked forms is the unmarked case.
The situation is quite different in Icelandic: Case morphology is not confined to
78 I assume that Normative pressure concerning (0.b) is
forcing an ungrammatical construction.
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