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summary
‘Genitive compounds with strong adjectives in the first part’
Keywords: word formation, adjectives as first parts, genitive compounds, diachronic
development, syntax
This article discusses a specific type of genitive compounds in Icelandic and their historical
development. This type of compound has genitive plural forms of strong adjectives in the
first part, e.g. sjúkra(gen.pl.)rúm, lit. ‘sick (people’s) bed’, i.e. ‘sickbed’, fátækra(gen.pl.)
hverfi, lit. ‘poor (people’s) district’, i.e. ‘district populated by poor people, slum’, and blindra-
(gen.pl.)letur, lit. ‘blind (people’s) script’, i.e. ‘script for blind people, braille’. The type in
question is particularly interesting because it has stronger ties to syntactic structures than
the more common types with nouns as first parts. Compounds of this type arguably orig-
inate in syntax as their word formation almost always reflects a corresponding underlying
syntactic structure. Accordingly, the word formation of fátækrahverfi derives from hverfi
fátækra ‘district of poor (people)’ with a noun and an attributive genitive; the attribute ends
up as the first part in the compound, resulting in a merger of the attribute and the noun.
The study is based on a thorough investigation of digital resources, in particular ONP
– Dictionary of Old Norse Prose, which covers texts up to 1540, and RMS – Ritmálssafn
Orðabókar Háskólans, a lexicographical archive of excerpted citations from 1540 to modern
times. The study reveals an interesting development in these compounds from Old Ice -
landic to Modern Icelandic. In early Icelandic, we find structures like [[sjúkra manna] [hús]]
from [[hús [sjúkra manna]] ‘sick men’s house’, and then a later development shows that the
nominal part of the attribute, manna, is omitted and the adjective is left alone in the role
of the modifying part, i.e. sjúkrahús, lit. ‘sick (people’s) house’, i.e. ‘hospital’. The omission
of the nominal part of the attribute is in the vast majority of cases predictable as it almost
always has a reference to human beings.
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