Time-clefts, expletives and orality in Early Icelandic saga
narratives
This paper challenges the received wisdom on the diachronic
development of expletives in Germanic and contributes to the increasing
crosslinguistic evidence that expletives can be related to discourse-pragmatic
properties, even at an early stage in their development. I examine the status of
expletive
það in Early Icelandic saga narratives (1250–1450) in
time-clefts (‘It was one time that…’) via corpus data from MIcePaHC (
Ingason 2020). The MIcePaHC data
indicates that time-clefts have special status in Early Icelandic as the only
context where
það is already obligatory. Moreover,
það is robustly attested not just in the prefinite position
but also postfinitely, thus contributing to the growing evidence against the
standard view that Germanic expletives are initially motivated by the
verb-second requirement. Considering broader discourse-pragmatic factors which
have generally been neglected in this context, I link the early establishment of
það in time-clefts to the specific discourse functions of
the construction (backgrounding, known-fact effect), and connect this with the
Icelandic sagas’ special status as orally-derived narratives.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Background
- 2.1The prefinite first hypothesis and its challenges
- 2.2The sagas of Icelanders and their context
- 3.Time-clefts and expletive það
- 3.1A cleft-like construction in saga narratives
- 3.2The status and distribution of expletive það
- 3.3A comparison with Old English
- 3.4The discourse-pragmatic functions of time-clefts
- 4.Conclusion
- Acknowledgements
- Notes
-
References
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References (83)
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