Íslenskt mál og almenn málfræði - 01.01.1985, Page 138

136
Christer Platzack
However, the way of counting the frequency of narrative inversion
after ok that Sigurðsson uses is not the only one available. In my
opinion, we will get an even better idea of the effect of ok upon narra-
tive inversion if we determine the frequency of ok+VS in relation to all
cases with VS, with or without ok. If this way of counting is applied to
my material, we get the following percentage figures for narrative in-
version after ok in the three Sagas studied: in Grettis saga, FS1 is pre-
ceded by ok in 26% of the cases, in Gísla saga, VS is preceded by ok in
73% of the cases, and in íslendinga saga KS is preceded by ok in 36%
of the cases. Thus, the tendency to use narrative inversion after ok is
especially high in Gísla saga. This result is in agreement with the re-
sult of Kossuth’s investigation (Kossuth 1978:48).
It is evident from the figures above that the presence or absence of
ok cannot explain all occurrences of narrative inversion. There seems
to be a general agreement among the scholars that have studied this
construction more thoroughly that the VS-order is used when a sen-
tence is firmly tied to the preceding context; thus, e.g., Rieger
(1968:98) talks about „der logischen Verkniipfung des einzelnen Satzes
mit Spitzenstellung des finiten Verbs mit dem Vorhergehenden".
Kossuth (1980:134) claims that verb-fírst order shows „that the topic is
established“. According to Sigurðsson (1983:1 18), the pragmatic/func-
tional rule for narrative inversion in Old Icelandic was the following
one:
Frásagnarumröðun er (undantekningalítið) því aðeins beitt í fornu
máli að setning feli einungis í sér viðbúnar upplýsingar (þ.e. bæði í
þema og rema).
Taking these observations to indicate that the subject of a sentence
with narrative inversion should not introduce new information, we
would expect a high proportion of the VS-sentences to have a subject
with the same reference as the subject of the immediately preceding
sentence. This expectation seems to hold true, as can be seen from
Table 2 on the next page.
In all three Sagas, the proportion of VS-sentences is higher when the
subject is referentially equal to the subject of the immediately preced-
ing sentence. However, it is only in Islendinga saga that we find a
more substantial difference.