Íslenskt mál og almenn málfræði - 01.01.1981, Side 98

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Karen C. Kossuth
likely he is to need marking, what Hodler (1954:105) calls “intime
Artikellosigkeit”. This is particularly true of statements of rank —
konungr ‘king’, jarl ‘earl’, hertogi ‘duke’. It is also true, but to a lesser
extent, of occupational nouns and other designations of types of humans
which are frequently unique in their particular texts: bóndi ‘landowner’,
heiðingi ‘heathen’, and compounds with -maðr ‘man’: sendimaðr ‘mes-
senger’, varðmaðr ‘guard’, njósnamaðr ‘spy’, etc. Of course, in spite of
tendencies which are clearly present, the actual choice of definite or
unmarked NP is still open to the writer’s sense of topicality. This is
clear from the alternate reading footnoted to hertoganum ‘the duke’,
which appears elsewhere as jarli ‘earl’ without the suffix (Magnússona
saga, Hkr. 1:227).
The same noun is also more likely to be unmarked in the singular
than in the plural. For example, a noun almost always unmarked in the
singular is konungr ‘king’, but when two kings are mentioned in Haralds
saga Sigurðssonar, the plural noun (Hkr. 111:99-104) is definite three
out of four occurrences.
5. Syntactic Cohesion
5.0
The semantic and discourse factors in the anaphoric progression
given above are reinforced and the ambiguous marking is disambi-
guated by two aspects of Old Icelandic syntax.
5.1 Grammatical Relations
In Old Icelandic as in other languages (Givón 1974, Keenan 1976)
the subject is most likely to be old information, and the direct object
most likely new information, with other grammatical relations in
between. A count was made of Magnússona saga of the distribution of
definite and indefinite nouns: As indefinite were counted those marked
with ngkkurr or einn, e.g. En menn mpkkurir .. . tóku á sundi mann
einn ‘But some men noticed a man swimming’ or unmarked non-ana-
phoric nouns, e.g. vitr maðr ‘a wise man’ or í kafi ‘submerged’ or
marked with an indefinite quantifier or numeral, e.g. margr vándr maðr
‘many a bad man’. The category of definite included nouns with definite
suffixes, e.g. hjá skipunum, ‘by the ships’, proper nouns, nouns with a
genitive NP, e.g. sonr Magnúss konungs ‘(the) son of King Magnus’,
nouns inalienably possessed, e.g. af htpfði honum ‘from his head’, and