We discuss remarkable constructions in Icelandic that have the distributive pronoun hvor ‘each’ in common: the reciprocal construction hvor annar ‘each other’, and the distributive construction hvor sinn ‘each their’, which also comes in a sinn hvor ‘their each’ version. We provide the first detailed description of these constructions, in particular their case and word order properties, which raise recalcitrant puzzles, and then we discuss what they say about the syntax of nonfinite verbs. Specifically, the word order and case properties of these constructions indicate that nonfinite verbs in Icelandic undergo short verb movement within the verb phrase. That is, the evidence indicates that the leftmost element in these constructions, alternatively hvor or sinn , originates inside an object DP and moves, by what we call e-raising, to the base position of an antecedent with which it agrees, before being stranded by that very antecedent. Nevertheless, the verb appears to the left of this element, even when it is a nonfinite verb, showing that it must undergo short movement to the left of Spec,vP. In addition, the interaction of e-raising and case has important consequences for Case theory, as it indicates that case agreement and case marking take place in PF.

The goal of this article is to understand the syntax of Icelandic indirect causatives (ICs), especially with respect to the implicit causee. We show that the complement of the causative verb must be at least as large as a VoiceP, and that it shares some properties with active VoicePs and others with passive VoicePs. We make sense of this state of affairs by proposing that the causee, while phonetically silent, has an explicit syntactic representation, but as a φP rather than a DP. We further propose that ICs are built by stacking a second VoiceP on top of the lexical verb’s first VoiceP, and that this configuration, along with the underspecified interpretation of φP, leads to a special thematic interpretation of both the causer and the implicit causee. Our analysis suggests that there are certain core ingredients involved in building ICs—such as stacked VoicePs and an underspecified causee—but that the source of these ingredients can vary across languages and constructions, depending on the formal primitives that grammars make available to the languages more generally.

In Wood 2012 , I argued that object extraposition of infinitive clauses in Icelandic reveals a problem for the movement theory of control (MTC). Object extraposition involves a pronoun that, when present, prevents any movement out of the extraposed clause, but allows the control dependency. Drummond and Hornstein (2014) claim that the facts discussed in Wood 2012 are compatible with the MTC. In this reply, I show that their response is based on a misunderstanding of how Icelandic object extraposition works and that the problem observed in Wood 2012 remains. I also present a novel argument against the MTC by showing that Drummond and Hornstein’s account of ‘promise’ - type verbs cannot be extended to Icelandic.

In this squib, we provide novel empirical support for treating the thematic domain—the vP —as a locality domain like CP (a phase ), in agreement with a growing body of research (see Fox 1999 , Barbiers 2002 , Legate 2003 , Rackowski and Richards 2005 , Cozier 2006 , Kahnemuyipour and Megerdoomian 2011 , Buell 2012 , Van Urk and Richards 2015 ; see Den Dikken 2006 for an opposing view). We show how vP phasehood solves a previously unsolved problem for defining the locality of Icelandic Stylistic Fronting. We present novel data to show that Stylistic Fronting of verbs and particles can only cross one phase boundary, a generalization that is empirically superior to clause-boundedness. Our study supports the view that v defines a phase edge whether the verb is linked to an external argument or not ( Legate 2003 , Marantz 2007 ).