Complex Grammar: What This Group Covers

Everything in this group sits on top of grammar you already have. You have met the subjunctive, the three conditional types, reported speech, the V2 rule, and the topological-field template at B1. What you have not yet seen is how these systems interlock — how a single Icelandic sentence can simultaneously assign quirky case to its subject, suspend V2 in an embedded clause, backshift into the past subjunctive, and bind a reflexive across a clause boundary, all at once, and all obligatorily. This page is the map. It tells you what the Complex Grammar group covers, why these particular phenomena belong together, and — crucially — which of them are obligatory and meaning-bearing, not decorative polish you can skip. (For introductions, follow the links back to the B1 pages; this group assumes them and goes deeper.)

Why these phenomena belong together

Icelandic is, for a major world language, unusually transparent: its inflectional morphology is rich and largely intact, so the relationships that English buries inside word order or leaves entirely implicit are spelled out on the words themselves. That transparency is exactly why Icelandic became one of the primary data sources for modern syntactic theory. When linguists wanted to know whether subjects are a single uniform category, or how far a reflexive can be bound from its antecedent, or what licenses a verb to appear second, they kept coming back to Icelandic — because here you can see the answer in the case endings and the mood marking.

The phenomena in this group are the ones where that visibility matters most:

• The subjunctive in depth (mood selection as a marker of non-assertion, not a syntactic reflex) — see complex/subjunctive-deep.
• Conditionals in depth (inverted ef-less conditionals, mixed time types, concessive conditionals) — complex/conditionals.
• Reported speech and sequence of mood (backshift into the past subjunctive, deictic shift, reported questions and commands) — complex/reported-speech.
• Raising and control (why some "subjects" keep their case under a higher verb and others don't) — complex/raising-and-control.
• The long-distance reflexive sig (binding across clause boundaries, licensed by the subjunctive) — complex/binding-sig.
• Comparative deletion, agreement subtleties, and information structure — complex/comparative-deletion, complex/agreement-subtleties, complex/information-structure.
• Advanced clause linking (purpose vs result, causal nuance, concessive chains) — complex/clause-linking.

What unites them is a single fact about Icelandic: case, V2, and the living subjunctive are not independent systems. They constantly constrain one another. The subjunctive that you need for reported speech is the same subjunctive that licenses long-distance sig; the case that a quirky-subject verb assigns is the same case that survives raising into a higher clause. Learn them as one interconnected system and they reinforce each other.

A teaser of each theme

You will not fully parse these yet — that is what the dedicated pages are for — but seeing the constructions side by side shows you the terrain.

Long-distance binding of sig. The reflexive sig "himself/herself/themselves" can refer back across a clause boundary to the subject of a higher clause — something English flatly forbids — and the subjunctive in the embedded clause is what makes it possible.

Raising with case preservation. When a quirky (non-nominative) subject is raised into a higher clause, it keeps its original case. The dative subject of leiðast "be bored" stays dative even after it raises to be the subject of virðast "seem".

A past counterfactual. The pluperfect subjunctive (hefði + supine) builds a regret about the unchangeable past, in both clauses.

Mood as commitment. The same matrix verb takes the indicative when the speaker vouches for the fact and the subjunctive when merely reporting it.

Information structure via fronting. Icelandic can front almost any constituent into the prefield to mark it as the topic, while V2 keeps the verb in second place — and a special operation, stylistic fronting, can even fill the prefield with a non-argument to keep a subjectless clause well-formed.

What this group deliberately excludes

This group is for deepening, not introducing. So it does not re-teach the basics. The four big subjunctive triggers, the three conditional types, the form tables of the subjunctive, the V2 rule itself, the inventory of subordinating conjunctions — those live in the Verbs, Syntax, and Conjunctions groups and are linked from each page here. If a page below seems to assume you already know something, that something has a B1 home, and the page will point you to it. Treat the B1 pages as prerequisites you can revisit, not as content this group repeats.

The honest difficulty: what is obligatory, not optional

Here is the single most important warning for an advanced learner, and the most common conceptual error at this stage. Because these constructions feel sophisticated — the things "advanced speakers" do — learners are tempted to treat them as optional stylistic polish: nice to have, safe to skip, the indicative will do in a pinch. That is wrong, and it produces sentences that are not merely plain but ungrammatical or wrong in meaning.

• The subjunctive in reported speech is not optional. Hann sagði að hún var veik (indicative) does not mean a less elegant version of "he said she was ill" — it shifts the speaker into vouching for her illness, or simply reads as an error.
• Long-distance sig is not optional. If you replace it with the ordinary pronoun hana/hann, you change who is referred to. Jón segir að María elski sig means María loves Jón; Jón segir að María elski hann means she loves some other man. The reflexive is meaning-bearing.
• Case preservation under raising is not optional. Nominative on a quirky subject is simply ungrammatical: *Hún virðist leiðast is wrong; it must be dative henni.

So the through-line of this group is the opposite of "polish." These are the points where getting it wrong is audible, visible, and sometimes meaning-changing.

Why Icelandic, specifically, rewards this

A short word on why an English speaker should invest here, beyond "it's correct." Icelandic is one of the languages where linguists first described quirky subjects (non-nominative arguments that nonetheless behave like full subjects), long-distance reflexive binding, and stylistic fronting. These are not obscure footnotes — they are central chapters in how we understand the architecture of human language. This group gives you the descriptive vocabulary for all of it without drowning you in formal notation: enough to read an advanced grammar, follow a linguistics paper's Icelandic examples, and — far more usefully — to produce these constructions yourself, the way an educated native does without thinking.

Common Mistakes

The subjunctive is not separable from the binding; treating mood as optional here breaks the very construction that lets sig reach the higher subject.

Nominative is the default subject case, but quirky-case verbs override the default — and raising does not reset it.

Information-structure fronting does not switch off V2; the two operate together.

Key Takeaways

• This group deepens, it does not introduce: the subjunctive, conditionals, reported speech, raising/control, sig-binding, comparative deletion, agreement, and information structure — with the B1 pages as prerequisites.
• These phenomena belong together because in Icelandic case, V2, and the living subjunctive constrain one another; the same subjunctive that drives reported speech also licenses long-distance sig, and the same case a quirky verb assigns survives raising.
• The overriding warning: several of these are obligatory and meaning-bearing, not optional polish. Dropping the reported subjunctive, swapping sig for a plain pronoun, or putting nominative on a quirky subject changes meaning or breaks the sentence.
• Icelandic is a primary data source for syntactic theory (quirky subjects, long-distance binding, stylistic fronting); this group gives you the descriptive vocabulary without the formalism.
• Use the links: every page here points back to its B1 foundation and across to its sibling complex pages.