Íslenskt mál og almenn málfræði - 01.01.1985, Page 135

Narrative Inversion in Old Icelandic 133
(4) a... at Grettir er kominn austan ór fjQrðum (Grettis saga,
1937:205)
b En er hann varð þess víss,... (Grettis saga, 1937:165)
Compare also the word order of direct and indirect w/z-questions:
(5) a eða hvar náðirþú saxinu góða (Grettis saga, 1937:60)
b Hvat mælir þú til? (Grettis saga, 1937:169)
(6) a Vígbjóðr spurði, hverir þessir væri (Grettis saga, 1937:1 1)
b en er hann fann Signýju, spurði hann, hveija liðveizlu þau vildu
af honum þiggja (Grettis saga, 1937:17)
2. Narrative inversion in three Old Icelandic Sagas — a frequency
study
In the light of the previous discussion, it is evident that Kossuth does
not give us a correct impression of how frequent narrative inversion
was in Old Icelandic declarative main clauses, and Sigurðsson does it
only for some of his texts. Since the issue is controversial, a new count
is advised. Like Kossuth, I will base my calculations on samples from
some of the classical Sagas, viz. Grettis saga Ásmundarsonar, Gísla
saga Súrssonar and íslendinga saga. For the first two Sagas, I have
used the íslenzk fornrit edition, for the last Saga, the edition published
1946 by Jón Jóhannesson, Magnús Finnbogason and Kristján Eldjám.
I have not checked the editions against the manuscripts; thus, there
might be some differences between the texts I have analyzed and the
manuscripts underlying these texts (cf. the investigation by Sigurðsson
referred to above).
From each Saga, a sample of 390 declarative macrosyntagms from
26 different pages scattered all over the Saga were drawn and analyzed
according to Teleman (1974) (cf. Platzack 1984). For the purpose of
the study of narrative inversion, these macrosyntagms were divided
into the following four groups; the examples below are taken from
Grettis saga. It is to be noticed that the presence or absence of a co-
ordinating conjunction in the front of a macrosyntagm has no in-
fluence on the classification; thus, the following sequences were ana-
lyzed as belonging to the same word-order pattem: ok bar hann hátt í
sleðanum\ bar hann hátt í sleðanum. However, in the subsequent ana-