Milli mála - 2021, Blaðsíða 178
Milli mála 13/2021 177
b. Þetta er gersamlega óskiljanleg ákvörðun. (DV.is)
this is completely incomprehensible decision
‘This is a completely incomprehensible decision.’
c. Þú ert að verða gersamlega óþolandi! (Útgefnar bækur)
you are to become completely unbearable
‘You are becoming completely unbearable!’
d. Það var gersamlega vonlaust að tala við hana. (Morgunblaðið)
it was completely hopeless to talk with her.
‘It was completely hopeless to talk to her.’
In (6a–d), gersamlega co-occurs with ómögulegur (6a), óskiljanlegur
(6b), óþolandi (6c), and vonlaust (6d). In general, it seems that ger-
samlega tends to collocate with adjectives that display a feeling of
unacceptability or impossibility, which is also consistent with the
above examples. Notably, gersamlega most frequently occurs in
Alþingisræður ‘Parliamentary Speeches’ in the RMH (3119 of 4731
examples, i.e., 65.9%), and the results may be attributable to the
genre. In this regard, similar results are obtained from the MÍM.
The same search in the MÍM reveals 59 examples, in which the
most frequent adjectives following gersamlega are ótækur ‘useless,
impossible’ (4 times), óþolandi (3), haldlaus ‘baseless’ (2), ómögulegur
(2), óhæfur ‘unfit, incompetent’ (2), laus ‘loose’ (2), and gagnslaus
‘useless’ (2). Although not many examples can be found in the MÍM
because of the size of the corpus, the same tendency as in the RMH
can be observed. As the most frequent adjectives that follow gersam-
lega are almost exclusively negatively loaded words, it appears pos-
sible that gersamlega has negative semantic prosody.
In the above table, it appears that búinn is a somewhat neutral
word, and it thus may seem to be inconsistent with the above state-
ment. However, after a closer look at the examples, it can immedi-
ately be seen that in many cases the word is used in a negative
context.
(7) a. Ég var ekki að sofna strax, var hátt uppi og gersamlega
búinn á því. (DV.is)
YUKI MINAMISAWA