Íslenskt mál og almenn málfræði - 01.01.2002, Page 202

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Jón G. Friðjónsson
Wisén, Theodor (útg.). 1872. Homiliu-bók. Islandska Homilier efter en handskrift frán
tolfte árhundradet. Islándska skinnboken 15 qv. á Kungl. Bibliotheket i Stock-
holm. Lundi.
SUMMARY
Keywords: prepositional phrases, diacronic linguistics, Old Icelandic, diachronic
syntax
This article is an answer to criticism set fort by Andrea de Leeuw van Weenen (AW)
in ísleriskt mál (22:91-99) on my paper on the developement of prepositional phrases
containing the preposition mót (derived from the substantive mót) in Islenskt mál
(21:31-70). The main criticism of AW is of two kinds: first, my use of sources, and
second, the collection of the data. AW points correctly out that I did not always use
diplomatic edition of texts, e.g. not her edition of the Icelandic Homily Book, nor did
I always cite diplomatic editions when using material from the Sagas. Instedad I cited
the edition of íslenska fomritafélagið. To my mind there is a fundamental difference
between editing diplomatic texts and a lexicographic-syntactic study of the kind I
undertook in my article. In the first instance, an accurate rendering of the forms is of
course of utmost importance and statistical information is in many cases very valu-
able. To my mind the same methods do not necessarily apply to the analysis of
syntactic function and syntactic structures in texts. It is of course always mandatory
to make sure that the examples cited are correct by comparing them to diplomatic ed-
itions, which I do whenever possible. There is a long tradition of using the edition of
Islenska fomritafélagið (IF) in scholarly works, and in some cases better editions are
simply not available. In IF the editors always give a full account of the manuscripts
used with a good sample of variant readings. Consequently the reader is in no doubt
as to the age and origin of the manuscripts used. It seems to me that the word forms
given in these editions provide a solid basis for the understanding of the function and
form of the constructions in question. I have serious doubts that computerized lists are
of much use in this connection. I for one prefer to work with coherent texts.
The second point of AW criticism concems the collection of data. AW presents a
recipe for this, based on text samples from different periods and of different genres.
It is true that I did not find it neccesary to discuss the methodological aspect in any
detail. Frankly I thougth it would be obvious from the material presented. To my mind
a sample collection is not sufficient in this connection — all available texts must be
taken into consideration, but most importlanly the collector must have a fair idea of
what he is looking for. The prepositions (álí) móts við, eftir,fyrir and many others can
thus have a different function, depending on the age of the different manuscripts and
neither computerized material nor word lists can reveal this. Thus there is a funda-