Milli mála - 2021, Page 172
Milli mála 13/2021 171
words collocate with the verb fremja in its object position. The
search was confined to nouns in the accusative case following the
verb and yielded 20,808 examples, and revealed 670 nouns in total.
Table 1 shows the 10 most frequent collocates of fremja.
No. Word Freq. No. Word Freq.
1 brot 3,216 6 morð 1,051
2 sjálfsmorð 2,373 7 afbrot 800
3 sjálfsvíg 1,739 8 rán 769
4 glæpur 1,204 9 verknaður 758
5 hryðjuverk 1,204 10 ódæði 458
Table 1: The 10 most frequent objects of the verb fremja in the RMH
In Table 1, all of the 10 most frequent collocates are associated with
criminal or other bad acts, and these 10 collocates make up about
65% of all the examples (13,572 out of 20,808).12 The following
examples are taken from the RMH:
(2) a. Konan var 18 ára þegar hún framdi brotin. (Morgunblaðið)
the-woman was 18 years when she committed the-crimes
‘The woman was 18 years old when she committed the crimes.’
b. Fimmtán ára stúlka framdi sjálfsmorð eftir að hafa orðið
fyrir hrottalegu einelti. (DV.is)
fiften years girl committed suicide after to have become
for brutal bullying.
‘A fifteen-year old girl committed suicide after she had
suffered brutal bullying.’
c. Á þeim aldri eru karlar líklegastir til að fremja glæpi.
(Morgunblaðið)
on that age are males most-probable to to commit crimes
‘At that age, males are most likely to commit crimes.’
12 The high frequency might be ascribed to the large quantity of newspaper articles in the corpus,
but the same search in the MÍM shows sjálfsmorð (40 times), glæpur (20), brot (17), morð (15), and
hryðjuverk (9) as the five most frequent collocates.
YUKI MINAMISAWA