What is it about?
Medieval Icelandic texts frequently make use of particular time-phrase used at the beginning of new episodes in the story. I investigate the use of these time-phrases in detail for the first time and claim that they are used to mark information as a generally known fact. I connect this with the fact that these texts are derived from oral narratives, where creating an impression of shared knowledge rooted in tradition is very important.
Featured Image
Photo by Tucker Monticelli on Unsplash
Why is it important?
The time-phrase in question features a dummy element which has no meaning but is used to satisfy linguistic requirements separate to meaning. The findings challenge the received wisdom on such dummy elements and how they develop over time, showing that such elements can be employed for discourse-pragmatic reasons already at the very earliest stage in their development.
Perspectives
I hope that this article will encourage more linguists working with medieval texts to consider the context in which such texts came to be (often as orally-derived narratives), and to take this into account when analysing their linguistic characteristics.
Hannah Booth
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Time-clefts, expletives and orality in Early Icelandic saga
narratives, Evolutionary Linguistic Theory, December 2024, John Benjamins,
DOI: 10.1075/elt.00053.boo.
You can read the full text:
Resources
Contributors
The following have contributed to this page
