ИСТИНА

This guest talk was given at the University College of London, 29 March 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.