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A Study of Modified Noun Phrases in the Bryggen in Bergen Runic Material and Other Old Norwegian Sources

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A Study of Modified Noun Phrases in the Bryggen in Bergen Runic Material and Other Old Norwegian Sources A study of modified noun phrases in the Bryggen in Bergen runic material and other Old Norwegian sources “Sezt niðr ok ráð rúnar!” Ágnes Viktória Jávorszky Master's thesis in linguistics in Viking and Medieval Norse Studies Department of Linguistics and Scandinavian Studies (ILN) UNIVERSITY OF OSLO Faculty of Icelandic and Comparative Cultural Studies UNIVERSITY OF ICELAND Spring 2018 A study of modified noun phrases in the Bryggen in Bergen runic material and other Old Norwegian sources “Sezt niðr ok ráð rúnar!” Ágnes Viktória Jávorszky Master's thesis in linguistics in Viking and Medieval Norse Studies Department of Linguistics and Scandinavian Studies (ILN) UNIVERSITY OF OSLO Faculty of Icelandic and Comparative Cultural Studies UNIVERSITY OF ICELAND Spring 2018 III © Ágnes Viktória Jávorszky 2018 A study of modified noun phrases in the Bryggen in Bergen runic material and other Old Norwegian sources Ágnes Viktória Jávorszky http://www.duo.uio.no/ Printing: Reprosentralen, Universitetet i Oslo The quote on the front page is from the Bryggen in Bergen inscription N B584 M. IV Summary This thesis examines the runic inscriptions of Bryggen in Bergen as well as the Old Norwegian corpus currently consisting of four texts in the Menotec corpus of Old Norwegian, with regard to modified noun phrases. The relevant noun phrases in the Bryggen in Bergen corpus are glossed and, along with the relevant output from the Old Norwegian corpus, they are gathered into tables and statistics are drawn and contrasted to other, existing research on Old Icelandic. The thesis is a part of the project Constraints on syntactic variation: Noun phrases in early Germanic languages project (NFR 261847) and carries out research for the initial stages of the project, to examine the empirical distribution of noun phrases. The aim of this thesis is to draw up potential patterns in Old Norwegian with regard to the word order in modified noun phrases, with a focus on noun phrases containing a noun and an adjective or a noun and a possessive (possessive pronoun and reflexive possessive). While in the Bryggen in Bergen inscriptions, the statistics concern all noun phrases with a common noun and a complement that is not an epithet or apposition, in the Old Norwegian corpus, only the noun phrases with a common noun and an adjective or a common noun and a possessive (possessive pronoun or reflexive possessive) are considered. Keywords: Old Norwegian, Bryggen in Bergen runic inscriptions, noun phrases, noun phrase modification. V Foreword First, I would like to thank Terje Spurkland for starting me out on the road of runes. Without him, this thesis would not have come to be in its present form. I would also like to thank Karl G. Johansson who helped me with difficulties I faced while translating Old Norse and answered any and all questions I had regarding the technical parts of the thesis; Alexander Pfaff who has also provided some much-appreciated insight into alternative translations of runic inscriptions as well as helped me understand his system of annotation that I have used in this thesis; Paul Meuer at INESS, who helped me to refine my queries so that I could search in the database; Marco Bianchi at the Samnordisk runtextdatabas who helped me with software issues; Antonio Mitag who was indispensable when searching for sources or trying to sort out stubborn queries in INESS which refused to work after several tries; Kjell Jonas Nordby, who kindly gave me access to the Runic Archives at the Museum of Cultural History in Oslo; and all the rest of you whom I did not name but who have helped with comments and questions regarding the topic. Last and most importantly, I would like to thank my supervisor, Kristin Bech, without whom this thesis could not have come into existence. Throughout the writing process, she was most supportive and pointed out things that were lacking, needed clarification, or, in fact, needed to be worked over completely. Thank you. May 2018 Ágnes Viktória Jávorszky VII Table of contents 1 Introduction ........................................................................................................................ 1 1.1 Background, aim, and scope ........................................................................................ 1 1.2 Research questions ...................................................................................................... 2 1.3 The structure of the thesis ............................................................................................ 2 1.4 Data used in the thesis ................................................................................................. 3 2 What are runes? .................................................................................................................. 5 3 Transliteration and translation of runic inscriptions ........................................................ 11 4 Issues with interpreting runic inscriptions ....................................................................... 15 5 A background to Bryggen in Bergen and its inscriptions ................................................ 25 6 Previous research on Old Norse noun phrases ................................................................. 35 6.1 Falk and Torp: Dansk-norskens syntax i historisk fremstilling (1900) ..................... 35 6.2 Nygaard: Norrøn syntax (1905) ................................................................................. 36 6.3 Ringdal: Om det attribute adjektivs position i oldnorsk prosa (1918) ...................... 37 6.4 Valfells and Cathey: Old Icelandic: An Introductory Course (1981) ....................... 38 6.5 Haugen: Grunnbok i norrønt språk (1995)................................................................ 38 6.6 Faarlund: The Syntax of Old Norse (2004) ................................................................ 39 6.7 Barnes: A New Introduction to Old Norse (2008) ..................................................... 41 6.8 Summary .................................................................................................................... 41 7 Glossing, categorization, and statistics from the relevant runic material from Bryggen in Bergen ...................................................................................................................................... 43 7.1 Glossing and categorization of the runic material ..................................................... 43 7.2 Statistics from the glossing of the runic material ...................................................... 60 7.2.1 Noun phrases with one dependent ...................................................................... 61 7.2.2 Noun phrases with multiple dependents ............................................................. 64 7.3 Summary .................................................................................................................... 66 IX 8 An analysis of noun phrases in the Menotec corpus of Old Norwegian .......................... 67 8.1 Noun and possessive .................................................................................................. 68 8.2 Noun and adjective .................................................................................................... 70 8.2.1 Adjectives by strong and weak declension ........................................................ 71 8.2.2 Adjectives by gradation ...................................................................................... 73 8.2.3 Adjectives appearing in Bryggen in Bergen examined in Menotec ................... 77 8.2.4 Adjectives by (semantic) categories ................................................................... 81 8.3 Summary .................................................................................................................... 93 9 Conclusion ........................................................................................................................ 95 9.1 Answers to the research questions ............................................................................. 96 9.2 Concluding remarks ................................................................................................... 97 Appendix 1: The Bryggen in Bergen inscriptions used in the thesis ..................................... 103 Appendix 2: Special characters .............................................................................................. 121 Appendix 3: List of transliterations in the database ............................................................... 125 X Table of figures Table 2.1 The elder fuþark (Spurkland 2010, 5) ........................................................................ 6 Table 2.2 The Anglo-Saxon and Old Frisian fuþorc (Page 2006, 39) ....................................... 7 Table 2.3 The younger fuþark (long-branch runes) (Spurkland 2010, 75) ................................ 8 Table 2.4 The younger fuþark (short-twig runes) (Spurkland 2010, 75) ................................... 8 Table 2.5 Medieval Norwegian runes (Spurkland 2010, 153) ................................................... 9 Table 7.2.1 Statistics of the distribution of constituents in noun phrases with one dependent from the Bryggen in Bergen runic material ............................................................................. 61 Table 7.2.2 Statistics of the distribution of constituents in noun phrases with multiple dependents from the Bryggen in Bergen runic material .........................................................
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