Íslenskt mál og almenn málfræði - 01.01.2021, Page 165

sara m. pons-sanz
Comments from the second opponent at
the doctoral defence of Matteo Tarsi

Introduction
I would like to congratulate Matteo and his supervisors for a dissertation that
makes an excellent contribution to the field of Icelandic lexicology. Matteo’s
work offers a painstaking and insightful account of the interaction, in a wide
range of prose genres, between loanwords from different languages, and Old and
Middle Icelandic ‘native’ terms (native is understood in this dissertation in a
broad sense, as various types of loans other than loanwords, such as semantic
loans or loan translations, are also counted amongst the latter).
In the United Kingdom, when our research is assessed as part of the Research
Excellent Framework, three main criteria are considered: originality, signifi-
cance, and rigour. I think that these are helpful criteria to bear in mind in relation
to any research, so I will use them as my guiding principles to discuss the disser-
tation.

Originality
The originality of the work becomes apparent in the introduction, where Matteo
points out that no other scholarly work has covered the breadth of source lan-
guages, lexico-semantic fields and textual genres explored in the present work. It
is, however, surprising that Dietrich Hofmann’s book on the interaction between
Norse and English terms during the Viking Age (Hofmann 1955) and Nik
Gunn’s recent dissertation on Old English loans recorded in Old Norse poetic
texts (Gunn 2017) are not mentioned in the literature review (although the latter
is referred to in connection with various etymological explanations, e.g. see pp.
8, 10, 35, etc.).

Significance
The significance of the dissertation lies primarily in the exploration of different
types of interaction (or “dynamics”) between loanwords and ‘native’ terms, viz.
the alternation between the pair members in a single text to refer to the same
concept, their coordination, the use of one term to explain the other, and the