Was Old Icelandic a Free Word Order Language?

In this guest talk given at the University College of London 29. 03. 2007, I argue that Old Icelandic was a free word order language (scrambling language), since the ordering in all binary groups constisting of a pair of sentence categories <a, b> could be reverted. The paradoxical consequence of this analysis is that scrambling of sentence categories coexists with a strict V1/V2 constraint preventing finite verbs from taking V > 2 positions in main clause declaratives. I also follow two research lines in general linguistics and Scandinavian studies. One of them is associated with sentence cartography and the equivalent notions introduced by Diderichen (1941, 1946). The second one focuses on the communicative (in other terms - information-structural) motivation of scrambling, i.e. permutations of the linear order. I argue that Old Icelandic applies to the same information-structural tools in deriving sentences with the fronted verb (V1 declaratives) as Modern Russian. However, free word order languages like Russian lack grammaticalization constraints like the Old Icelandic V1/V2 constraints. Moreover, Old Icelandic had clause-internal clustering clitics that take a fixed position (CL2 - CL3). This remarkable fact allows to place Old Icelandic into the class of the world's languages with grammaticalized constraints on the placement of clause-level clitic clusters.