Morphosyntactic Tagging of Old Icelandic Texts and Its Use in Studying Syntactic Variation and Change

Rögnvaldsson, Eiríkur; Helgadóttir, Sigrún

doi:10.1007/978-3-642-20227-8_4

Cited by 10 publications

(10 citation statements)

References 9 publications

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“…Using this corpus, Rögnvaldsson & Helgadóttir (2011) The most straightforward way of answering this question is to compare the frequency of NPOS in texts from different periods in the history of Icelandic, including Old Icelandic (Old Norse) and the modern language. Among the corpora established by the project Mörkuðíslensk málheild [A Tagged Corpus of Icelandic] (http://mim.hi.is) is a corpus of 1,659,285 words, based on the text of 44 Icelandic sagas, most of them probably written in the 14th and 15th century.…”

Section: Npos In Old Norsementioning

confidence: 99%

Full NP Object Shift: The Old Norse Puzzle and the Faroese Puzzle revisited

Þráinsson¹

2013

Nord J Linguist

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This paper argues that there is no reason to believe that full NP Object Shift (NPOS) was not found in Old Norse (Old Icelandic) nor that it is more common in Modern Icelandic than in earlier stages of the language. In addition, it is claimed that NPOS is also an option in Modern Faroese, contrary to common belief, although it is much more restricted in Faroese than in Icelandic. These results demonstrate the usefulness of systematic corpus studies while at the same time reminding us of their limits. In addition, they shed a new light on the status of Faroese among the Scandinavian languages and on the nature of intra-speaker variation and grammar competition.

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Section: Npos In Old Norsementioning

confidence: 99%

Full NP Object Shift: The Old Norse Puzzle and the Faroese Puzzle revisited

Þráinsson¹

2013

Nord J Linguist

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“…While modern Icelandic allows only a version of very short scrambling, so‐called object shift, which is not relevant for its status as NP/DP language and is already available in ON (Þráinsson : 160, Rögnvaldsson & Helgadóttir : 5–6), ON crucially also allows long scrambling. The pattern in (48), from ON prose, is not found in German or Dutch…”

Section: More Np/dp Propertiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Old Norse as anNPLanguage: With Observations on the Common Norse and Northwest Germanic Runic Inscriptions

Lander

Haegeman

2013

Trans of the Philol Soc

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The differences between languages with definite determiners and those without definite determiners have been the object of much research. Recently, Bo skovi c has uncovered a number of one-and two-way syntactic generalizations which serve to set these two typological groups apart. He accounts for the contrasts observed by proposing that languages with definite determiners ('DP' languages) have a DP layer, while determinerless languages ('NP' languages) lack this DP projection altogether. Since the Old Germanic languages did not have fully grammaticalized definite articles, a reasonable hypothesis to explore might be that they were NP languages in Bo skovi c's sense. In this paper we explore this hypothesis, focusing mainly on Old Norse; where possible we also discuss Old Norse's historical predecessors Common Norse and Northwest Germanic (both of which are attested exclusively in runic inscriptions). The specific NP properties considered in this paper are (A) the absence of a fully grammaticalized definite article, (B) syntactic discontinuities and free word order, (C) the absence of double adnominal genitives with transitive deverbal nouns, (D) the absence of clitic doubling and (E) the presence of radical argument drop. The paper's approach is guided by basic generative assumptions, but its focus is descriptive rather than theoretical.

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“…The corpus used for this research was the Fornrit subcorpus of the Mörkuð íslensk málheild (Tagged Icelandic Corpus) (Helgadóttir, Valsdóttir, Rögnvaldsdóttir, & Stefánsdóttir, 2007–present). Fornrit contains all of the Íslendingasögur , as well as some texts of related genres (the Old Icelandic þættir, Landnámabók , the Sturlungasaga, and Heimskringla ); these are in Modern Icelandic orthography (Rögnvaldsson & Helgadóttir, 2011:65) in order to facilitate comparison with Modern Icelandic. This orthography little resembles the manuscript orthographies of the time and so precludes undertaking any investigation of orthographic, phonological, or morphological variables.…”

Section: Language-specific Backgroundmentioning

confidence: 99%

Gender and language change in Old Norse sentential negatives

Blaxter

2015

Lang Var Change

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One consistent finding across sociolinguistic studies is the tendency for female speakers to lead in ongoing change. Different explanations have been proposed for this and a key method of testing these explanations is to identify whether the pattern occurs in the languages of a wider range of societies than have been studied thus far. Historical societies are relatively understudied in this regard, but undertaking variationist research into gender in historical varieties presents many challenges. One way to overcome these is to examine variation internal to fiction data. This paper presents an analysis of the effect of gender on the adverb selected for sentential negation in Old Norse prose fiction. It finds that female characters lead consistently in this change over time. In doing so, it demonstrates the feasibility of using fiction data when examining the effect of gender in historical varieties such as Old Norse.

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Morphosyntactic Tagging of Old Icelandic Texts and Its Use in Studying Syntactic Variation and Change

Cited by 10 publications

References 9 publications

Full NP Object Shift: The Old Norse Puzzle and the Faroese Puzzle revisited

Full NP Object Shift: The Old Norse Puzzle and the Faroese Puzzle revisited

Old Norse as anNPLanguage: With Observations on the Common Norse and Northwest Germanic Runic Inscriptions

Gender and language change in Old Norse sentential negatives

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