Agreement and the Icelandic Passive: A Smuggling Account

1 Background and Overview of the Data Since Zaenan, Maling, Thrainsson 1985, the Icelandic passive has been of interest to syntacticians. In particular, the Icelandic passive illustrates case-preservation with datives. An object that is accusative is the active surfaces as a nominative subject in the passive. However, an object that is dative in the active, surfaces as a dative subject in the passive. Icelandic also has active sentences with dative subjects, and if there is an object, it bears nominative. This paper explores two dichotomies in agreement in dative-nominative constructions. First, in actives, verbs obligatorily agree with nominative subjects, but optionally agree with nominative objects. (Icelandic verbs do not agree with datives.) The default form of the verb is allowed in (1)b, but not allowed in (1)a.