Non-Nominative Subjects in Old and Middle Danish

G. Hr. Hrafnbjargarson XVIth International Conference on Historical Linguistics
nominative case to its subject in Danish:
(3) OD. Drømde mik en drøm i nat ...
Dreamt me-OBL a dream in night
’I dreamt a dream tonight ...’ (1300, RUNEV, Brøndum-Nielsen 1932:14)
To show that Old Danish (OD) and Middle Danish (MD) did have oblique subjects, I will
make use of the subjecthood tests that have been used to argue for the existence of oblique
subjects in Icelandic and Faroese (cf. Andrews 1976, Thráinsson 1979, and Sigursson 1989),
on data I have collected at the Old Danish Dictionary. The examples I have collected include
the verbs behage ’please’ drøme ’dream’, dughe ’be fit’ gaghne ’be useful’ græmje ’grieve’,
like ’like’, lithe ’suffer’, sjune ’seem’ and thykje ’think / seem’.
I collected 139 examples from the period 1200-1515 where either the subject, or the object,
or both the subject and the object are pronouns. Not all of the subjecthood tests can be used
for Danish but the tests that can be used, e.g. subject position and reflexivization show that the
majority of the examples (107 of 139, 77%) have oblique subjects.
Around the year 1450, the probability of finding sentences (with the nine verbs mentioned
above) with oblique subjects becomes less than the probability of finding sentences with a
nominative subject and an accusative object.
2 Subjecthood tests
There are various ways of testing subjecthood. Subjects have special positions in embedded
clauses, reflexive pronouns can only be bound by subjects and subjects have a special position
in ECM constructions. An infinitive cannot check case on its subject, instead, the matrix verb
assigs and checks oblique case on the subject in the embedded clause (for example: She saw
[me read the book]). There are eight subjecthood tests (for a more detailed discussion and a
slightly different division of the tests, see Thráinsson 1979, Sigursson 1989:204-209, Rögnvaldsson
1996, and Bardal 2000):
1. Position 4. ECM 7. Control
2. Reflexivization 5. Raising 8. Cliticization
3. Conjunction Reduction 6. Heavy Subject Shift
Some of the eight tests are rather difficult to carry out, as for instance ECM construction,
because it is rare to have a verb that assigns oblique case to its subject embedded under verbs
like se ’see’, høre ’hear’, føle ’feel’, bede ’ask’, and lade ’let’. A test like Heavy Subject Shift
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