Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin - Sprach- und literaturwissenschaftliche Fakultät - Nordeuropa-Institut

Mediävistische Vorlesung im Rahmen des Masterseminars "Raum und Zeit in der altnordischen Literatur"

Odd Einar Haugen
University of Bergen

The encoding of space and time in Old Norwegian
Analysing two lais in the Strengleikar manuscript

The great majority of narrative texts contain descriptions of movement in space and time. In fact, the categories of space and time seem to be part and parcel of philosophical investigations since antiquity, by writers as diverse as Marcus Terentius Varro in his De lingua Latina 5.10 or Peter F. Strawson in his influential book Individuals (1959), in which he argues that the structure of our thoughts are basically spatiotemporal.

The aim of the present paper is to look into the linguistic encoding of space and time in a limited corpus of Old Norwegian narrative texts. The paper is based on the hypothesis that spatiotemporal movement will be encoded lexically primarily in a number of verbs, verbal particles, adverbs and prepositions, and secondarily in nouns and adjectives.

The corpus for the present investigation will be two lais in the Old Norwegian Strengleikar manuscript (Upps DG 4–7, ca. 1270). This manuscript has recently been morphologically and syntactically annotated and thus offers a convenient material for analysing the linguistic encoding of argument structure in Old Norwegian, and, by extension, Old Norse. The talk wil discuss examples from two of the shorter lais, Tveggja elskanda ljóð and Geitarlauf, and it will focus on a qualitative analysis rather than a quantitative one.