Time-clefts, expletives and orality in Early Icelandic saga narratives

Abstract This paper challenges the received wisdom on the diachronic development of expletives in Germanic and contributes to the increasing crosslinguistic evidence that expletives can be related to discourse-pragmatic properties, even at an early stage in their development. I examine the status of expletive það in Early Icelandic saga narratives (1250–1450) in time-clefts (‘It was one time that…’) via corpus data from MIcePaHC ( Ingason 2020 ). The MIcePaHC data indicates that time-clefts have special status in Early Icelandic as the only context where það is already obligatory. Moreover, það is robustly attested not just in the prefinite position but also postfinitely, thus contributing to the growing evidence against the standard view that Germanic expletives are initially motivated by the verb-second requirement. Considering broader discourse-pragmatic factors which have generally been neglected in this context, I link the early establishment of það in time-clefts to the specific discourse functions of the construction (backgrounding, known-fact effect), and connect this with the Icelandic sagas’ special status as orally-derived narratives.