Íslenskt mál og almenn málfræði - 01.01.1985, Blaðsíða 137

Narrative Inversion in Old Icelandic
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Table 1: Word Order Patterns in Grettis saga Ásmundarsonar (Gr),
Gísla saga Súrssonar (Gí) and íslendinga saga (ís). Absolute and rela-
tive frequencies for the patterns SV, VS, TVS, and Other. (For the
abbreviations, cf. the preceding text.)2
Gr Gí Is %
ok no ok Total ok no ok Total ok no ok Total Gr Gí i's
sv 2 159 161 3 135 138 3 152 155 41 35 40
vs 22 64 86 69 25 94 43 77 120 22 24 31
TVS 24 96 120 19 114 133 10 93 103 31 34 26
Other 8 15 23 11 14 25 4 8 12 6 6 3
56 334 390 102 288 390 60 330 390
As indicated by Table 1, narrative inversion (the pattem VS) is found
in 22% of the declarative macrosyntagms in Grettis saga Asmundar-
sonar, in 24% of the declarative macrosyntagms in Gísla saga Súrs-
sonar, and in 31% of the declarative macrosyntagms in Islendinga
saga. These figures are considerably higher than the figures reported
by Kossuth and Sigurðsson for this word order pattem; naturally, the
differences are a result of my decision to base my calculations only on
declarative main clauses (i.e., declarative macrosyntagms).
It is usually claimed that the VS-order is especially frequent after the
coordinated conjunction ok. Hallberg (1965), e.g., considers inversion
after ok as such a common trait of OI prose texts that he abstains from
using it as a possible author characteristic. The figures of Table 1 do
not support Hallberg’s conclusion: as we can see, inversion after ok is
much more common in Gísla saga than in the other two Sagas studied.
According to Sigurðsson (1983:63), inversion after ok is found in 90%
°f the cases, provided that we only count the two word order pattems
ok+SV and ok+VS. If this way of counting is applied to the figures in
Table 1 above, we get an even higher percentage figure for the inver-
sion after ok: there are 125 instances of ok+VS, only 8 instances of
ok+SV, i.e., inversion after ok is found in 94% of the cases.
2 Macrosyntagms preceded by other coordinated conjunctions (en, eða, enda etc.) are
mcluded under „no ofc“ in the table below. The number of such macrosyntagms in the
three samples is as follows: Gr: 40 (37 eri), Gí: 40 (38 eri), ís: 52 (52 eri). According to
Sigurðsson (1983), inversion is a rare phenomenon after en. This observation is con-
firmed in the present study: only one macrosyntagm (in Gí) has inversion after en.