Breakdown of Ég veit ekki hvort það er hönnuðurinn eða samkeppnin sem fær athyglina.
vera
to be
ég
I
það
it / there (existential) / the one (n)
ekki
not
fá
to get
eða
or
vita
to know (a fact, information)
sem
who / which / that
hvort
whether
athyglin
the attention
hönnuðurinn
the designer
samkeppnin
the competition (rivalry, business)
Questions & Answers about Ég veit ekki hvort það er hönnuðurinn eða samkeppnin sem fær athyglina.
How does the cleft sentence structure work here when we are emphasizing two things?
The cleft structure það er ... sem (it is ... that) wraps around the entire phrase you want to emphasize. Here, the focused element is the choice itself: hönnuðurinn eða samkeppnin. The relative pronoun sem simply waits until the whole emphasized phrase is finished before connecting it to the action.
Why are hönnuðurinn and samkeppnin in the nominative case?
In an Icelandic cleft sentence, the emphasized words take the exact same grammatical case they would have in a normal, non-cleft sentence. If we remove the það er ... sem structure, the basic sentence is Hönnuðurinn eða samkeppnin fær athyglina. Since they act as the subject doing the action (getting), they must stay in the nominative case.
Since there are two nouns being emphasized, why is the verb fær in the singular form?
What kind of word order does hvort trigger here?
hvort (whether) introduces an indirect question. A great B1 rule to remember is that indirect questions use normal statement word order. That is why it is followed immediately by the regular subject-verb order það er instead of the inverted order you would see in a direct question.
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