Dative construction

The dative construction is a grammatical way of constructing a sentence, using the dative case. A sentence is also said to be in dative construction if the subject and the object (direct or indirect) can switch their places for a given verb, without altering the verb's structure (subject becoming the new object, and the object becoming the new subject). The latter case is not to be confused with the passive voice, where only the direct object of a sentence becomes the subject of the passive-voiced sentence, and the verb's structure also changes to convey the meaning of the passive voice. The dative construction tends to occur when the verb indicates a state rather than an action.

In German, the dative construction sometimes occurs with the verb sein ("to be"). Compare:

The first example implies that the speaker has a cold personality. The subject here (ich, "I") is in the nominative case. The second construction is used when one wants to say "I am (feeling) cold" in German. While in English the subject of the sentence "I am cold" is "I", in German the subject of the sentence "Mir ist kalt" is kalt and mir ("me"-DATIVE) is the indirect object. The use of the nominative form equivalent to "I" is only possible with a different meaning: "Ich bin kalt"='I am cold (in personality)'. "Mir" behaves like a subject and can control infinitives:

"Mir war zu kalt um zur Kirche zu gehen"

me.DAT was too cold for to.the.Fem.D church to go.INFIN

'I was too cold to go to church' ("I" go, not "cold")

Dative constructions are extremely common in Icelandic. Their use is similar to that of German, although perhaps somewhat more widespread. The following example is exactly the same as the German one given above:

The implication of the first example is the same as in German, that the speaker has a cold personality rather than feeling physically cold. Dative constructions appear in many fixed expressions such as this, such as mér er alveg sama ("I don't care", lit. "to me it's completely the same"), henni er annt um umhverfið ("she cares about the environment", lit. "to her is dear about the environment") and þú getur fengið nýjan síma þér að kostnaðarlausu ("you can get a new phone free of charge", lit. "you can get a new phone to you at no cost").

Passive constructions in Icelandic also require the subject to be in the dative if the verb in question governs the dative, e.g. tímaáætluninni var breytt ("the timetable was changed"), skjölunum var eytt ("the documents were deleted") and framkvæmdum var frestað um tvær vikur ("works were delayed by two weeks"). Compare to passive constructions where the verb governs the accusative: búðin var opnuð á föstudaginn ("the shop was opened on Friday") and bréfið var sent fyrir hádegi ("the letter was sent before noon"). Verbs that govern the genitive behave in the same way as verbs governing the dative, e.g. þín verður saknað ("you will be missed").

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