Íslenskt mál og almenn málfræði - 01.01.2021, Page 171

clash with Professor Schulte’s suggestion and would actually lend it credit. In gen-
eral, synonymic dittologies were found to primarily serve a “stylistic function”,
that of achieving an emphatic and pleonastic effect. I called this “prose embellish-
ment”, but whether that is “stylistically beautiful” is debatable, as it would not be
considered so by contemporary standards. What is certain is that by means of syn-
onymic dittologies the prose becomes more stylistically marked and complex.
The formulaic function of synonymic dittologies mentioned by Schulte is
indeed found in the corpus, but that appears as subordinate to the emphatic/
pleonastic one. The distribution of synonymic dittologies in the text genres ana-
lyzed is as follows:2
Text genre Number of synonymic dittologies
Religious Texts 18
Law Texts and diplomata 7
Treatises 6
Historiographical Texts —
Hagiographical Texts 6
Sagas of the Icelanders 3
Kings’ Sagas 1
Chivalric and Legendary Sagas 10
Table 2:  Number of synonymic dittologies in the investigated text genres.

As examples of formulaic synonymic dittologies the word pairs articulus – grein
and próf – skilríki can be mentioned. These word pairs are typical of the highly
formulaic language of the diplomata. In contrast, legal texts proper show a very
low number of synonymic dittologies both in terms of types and tokens. This
datum could be a secondary effect related to the “law of semantic specificity” (cf.
the discussion in the presentation of the project). I say secondary effect because
the same correlation is not found, for example, in the Treatises. Hence, there
might be a correlation between semantic specificity and formulaic language on
the one hand and the use of synonymic dittologies on the other hand or, at large,
of formulaic binomials (cf. Tarsi 2020a:91–92).
Schulte’s research on binomials in legal texts (Schulte 2011) lends support to
my observation (not stated in the dissertation, but mentioned during the Högre
seminarium presentation I held in Uppsala in 2018) that one word pair, namely
kirkja – guðshús, might have arisen due to metrical reasons as it in fact occurs in
an allitterative sentence in Grágás (Konungsbók): hann skal firrask kirkior ok kristna
menn, guðshús ok guma heim nema helvíte.
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2 The table is based on the comparative data from Figure 4 (third bar in each group,
Tarsi 2020a:225) in the dissertation, which is the same as Figure 2.