Research project Syndetic Constructions in Fornaldarsaga Poetry
The project focusses on syndetic pairs, i.e. coordinating constructions where two words of the same part of speech are placed on an identical level of syntactic hierarchy.
Gull ok gersimar ‘gold och jewels’, öl né rekkar ‘ale nor warriors’ and drukkum ver ok dæmðum ‘we drank and conversed’ are some examples of this kind of device.
Syndetic constructions constitute the essential structural and semantic scaffolding of the metrical unit in which they occur, usually a half-line or a long line. The corpus for this study is the verses found in the prose context of the fornaldarsǫgur, which are a subgenre of the Icelandic sagas mainly dating back to the 14th and 15th centuries.
The aim of this project is to identify the unwritten rules of the ‘poetic grammar’ that governed the use of these constructions by analysing the patterns in their structural, semantic and pragmatic properties, as well as their role in composition.
Project members
Project managers
Giorgio Basciu
Doktorand
