Construction-specific properties of syntactic subjects in Icelandic and German

This paper discusses the syntactic similarities and differences in the behavior of subject-like obliques in the Obl-V-(XP) construction in Icelandic and German. Research on this construction so far has suggested that the subject-like oblique behaves as a syntactic subject in Icelandic, but as an object in German. Data from German are presented which show that the subject-like oblique in fact passes almost all the subject tests, with some restrictions. The differences between Icelandic and German are therefore much smaller, and the similarities much greater, than predicted by analyzing them as subjects in Icelandic and objects in German. A comparison between Icelandic and German further reveals that the subject criteria cannot be applied across two as closely related languages as Icelandic and German, and they cannot be consistently applied even within the same language. Therefore, grammatical relations like "subject" and "object" should be regarded, not as universal, not as language-specific, but as CONSTRUCTION-specific relations. It is shown that the difference between Icelandic and German resides in Obl-V-(XP) predicates being reluctant to occur in "elliptic" constructions in German, whereas their occurrences in such constructions in Icelandic are less restricted. This correlates with differences in the frequency of Obl-V-(XP) predicates in the two languages, suggesting that the construction exists at different levels of schematicity in Icelandic and German. This is expected on a usage-based account in which frequency is taken to be an important determinant of the language system.