Milli mála - 2021, Síða 173
172 Milli mála 13/2021
d. Hann framdi morð í fyrra og var dæmdur í ævilangt fangelsi
í síðasta mánuði (Vísir.is.)
he committed murder in former and was sentenced in
lifelong prison in last month
‘He committed a murder last year and was sentenced to
life imprisonment last month.’
In the above examples, fremja co-occurs with brot ‘violation, crime’
(2a), sjálfsmorð ‘suicide’ (2b), glæpur ‘crime’ (2c), and morð ‘murder’
(2d), all of which are related to criminal acts. From these examples,
it is obvious that the verb fremja can be used in a manner similar to
English commit and Norwegian begå. Thus, it is reasonable to con-
clude that fremja has negative semantic prosody.13
The verb fremja is a clear and simple example, and the results
may not be particularly surprising. As previously mentioned, how-
ever, native speakers are often not conscious of semantic prosody. In
the next chapter, the adverb gersamlega will be seen as a less obvious
case.
3. Semantic Prosody and the Adverb gersamlega
3.1 Descriptions from Icelandic Dictionaries
For the adverb gersamlega, there are two variants (or synonyms),
gersamlega and gjörsamlega, which are handled differently in different
Icelandic dictionaries. The ÍNO gives an entry for gersamlega, but for
gjörsamlega, only the link to gersamlega can be found. In ÍEO, there
are two separate entries, both with the same definition. Contrariwise,
ÍSO offers different definitions for both entries, although the differ-
13 While two historically unrelated words, such as fremja and begå, can be used in a similar manner,
cognates of closely related languages do not necessarily show the same tendency in terms of seman-
tic prosody. According to Íslensk orðsifjabók (Ásgeir Blöndal Magnússon 1989), Icelandic fremja is
a cognate of Swedish främja. They are derived from fram ‘forward’ and originally meant “föra
framåt” ‘carry forward’ (Hellquist 1922, 160). However, Swedish främja is now used quite differ-
ently from Icelandic fremja, typically in the meaning of ‘promote’.
SEMANTIC PROSODY IN ICELANDIC
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