Replication Data for: To Like or to Please, That is the Question: The (Non-)Alternating Dat-Nom/Nom-Dat Status of Old Norse-Icelandic Líka and Old English Lician ‘like’

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Dataset abstract: This dataset provides the tokens on which the analysis in the upcoming article: "To Like or to Please, That is the Question: The (Non-)Alternating Dat-Nom/Nom-Dat Status of Old Norse-Icelandic Líka and Old English Lician ‘like’" is based, which is submitted for publication.

The dataset contains a total of 576 Dat-Nom and Nom-Dat tokens collected for the Old Norse Icelandic verbs líka 'like', mislíka 'dislike', and duga 'suffice', as well as their Old English cognates (ge)lician 'like', mislician 'dislike', and dugan 'suffice'. For each token, both the nominative and the dative arguments are annotated for clause position, case marking, pronominality, pronoun type, person, number, definiteness, animacy, word length and syllable length. Additionally, each token is also annotated for main verb lemma, auxiliary verbs, translation, and translation assessment certainty. Finally, each token also includes bibliographical annotations, to retrieve the token within its critical edition of the original Old Norse-Icelandic or Old English text.

All tokens were gathered from two Old Norse-Icelandic corpora (the Saga Corpus; Íslenskt Textasafn), an Old Norse-Icelandic dictionary (the Dictionary of Old Norse Prose), and an Old English corpus (Dictionary of Old English Corpus).

Article abstract: In a recent article, Sigurðsson & Viðarsson (2020) argue that the Old Norse-Icelandic verb líka ‘like’ behaves fundamentally different from its Modern Icelandic counterpart líka ‘like’, as the former must be a Dat-Nom/Nom-Dat verb, while it is well known that the latter is a Dat-Nom verb, not occurring in the Nom-Dat argument structure. In this context, Sigurðsson & Viðarsson refer to existing research of the Old English and Gothic cognates, lician and galeikan, which have been analyzed as alternating between the Dat-Nom and the Nom-Dat argument structures in their respective languages. One major problem for Sigurðsson & Viðarsson is that a part of their dataset, which unambiguously shows that the nominative of líka behaves syntactically as a subject, stems from translated texts, a fact they themselves also acknowledge. This calls for a proper investigation of the argument structure of líka in diachrony, including a comparison with Old English. Thus, we have gathered 458 finite tokens of (-)líka and (-)lician in Old Norse-Icelandic and Old English, with a dative and a nominative argument, subjecting these to both quantitative and computational analyses. Our findings reveal a clear divide between native and translated Old Norse-Icelandic texts, with líka behaving as a Dat-Nom verb in native texts, but as an alternating Dat-Nom/Nom-Dat verb in translated texts. This effect was not found for Old English, where the lion’s share of the existing texts are translations anyway.

• Rögnvaldsson, Eiríkur, and Sigrún Helgadóttir. Morphosyntactic Tagging of Old Icelandic Texts and Its Use in Studying Syntactic Variation and Change. In Sporleder, Caroline, Antal P.J. van den Bosch og Kalliopi A. Zervanou (eds.): Language Technology for Cultural Heritage: Selected Papers from the LaTeCH Workshop Series. pp. 63–76. Springer, Berlin. The Saga Corpus.
• Íslenskt Textasafn. Stofnun Árna Magnússonar.
• ONP = The Dictionary of Old Norse Prose. University of Copenhagen.
• DOE = Dictionary of Old English Corpus. University of Toronto.