Íslenskt mál og almenn málfræði - 01.01.2021, Page 144

toral student at the Department of Nordic Languages of the University of Uppsala
during the academic year 2017–2018 under the guidance of Veturliði Óskarsson. It
is indeed a pleasure to write this article, almost a year after the actual defense, as a
guest researcher at the very same department in Uppsala (April 2021).3

2. Hypothesis, aims, main results, corpus and methodology
2.1 Hypothesis, aims, main results
The project is based on the assumption that, as a phenomenon, native words and
corresponding loanwords have always existed side by side in Icelandic. Thus, this
coexistence and (expected) competition preexisted purism in any form and,
before the advent of a purist ideology, it was primarily due to lexical needs, i.e. it
followed language-internal forces rather than being subject to prescriptivism.4
The interplay between loanwords and respective native words (and vice versa) is
one of the mechanisms at the basis of lexical development, and this — as it turns
out — is of chief importance for the formation of technical vocabulary (cf. § 5
below). The overarching aim of the project was to provide a thorough account of
the phenomenon by investigating how synonymic word pairs constituted by
loanwords and native words behaved in the Icelandic literary corpus before 1550.
Early in the project it was decided to take into account only prose works, because
poetry, apart from following a somewhat different kind of transmission, would
likely give a false result, as it is tied to metrical principles which necessarily
impinge upon lexical selection.5
The project has three main outcomes: a general one, a descriptive one, i.e. it
describes the ways in which loanwords and native words appear in the texts and
thus how they interact, and an etymological one.
The general outcome of the project (on which see in detail § 4) is a set of gen-
eralizations, thus of potential general linguistic interest, which describe the
dynamics governing the coexistence and competition of loanwords and native
words in a written language (with a literary tradition comparable to that of
Iceland) before purism. The general findings and methodology, which will be
described subsequently, can thus be tested on other languages.6
Matteo Tarsi144
3 The research stay was generously funded by the Vera and Greta Oldberg Found ation.
4 Although Icelandic has been subject to normatory forces from very early on in its
history (see e.g. the aim of the First Grammatical Treatise), purism was not one of them
until about the second half of the 16th century and more so in the wake of the Icelandic
independence movement in the 19th century. On the formation of the Icelandic linguistic
norm in the Middle Ages see Kristján Árnason (2002, 2003, 2004) and Tarsi (2017).
5 On lexical selection in early Icelandic poetry see the thorough work by Patria (2021).
6 I am presently (April 2021) carrying out a study in that sense as part of my research
stay at Uppsala University. Here, I am investigating the validity of the aforementioned set