Janus, Louis Elliot. The phraseology of Egils saga

• Author: Janus, Louis Elliot
• Title:
• Published in: The phraseology of Egils saga. Ph.D. thesis
• Place, Publisher: Minnesota: University of Minnesota
• Year: 1994
• Pages:
• E-text:
• Reference: Janus, Louis Elliot. The phraseology of Egils saga. Ph.D. thesis. Minnesota: University of Minnesota, 1994.

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• Key words: style, authorship (stíll, höfundur)

Annotation

A phraseological study of Egils saga. The first chapter focuses on various aspects of phraseology and the definition and identification of phraseological units. The second turns to the phraseology of Old Norse and the presentation, description and analysis of various types of set phrases in Old Norse, with examples taken from the corpus of the electronic text of Egils saga (as entered by L. Micheal Bell), the categories being: idioms; proverbs and saying; verb plus particle; verbal periphrasis; irreversible binomals; collocations; narrative formulas; and miscellaneous phrases and frameworks. In Chapter Three, Janus returns to verbal periphrasis and analyses the verb taka in the saga and how it combines with accusative noun objects. Janus concludes that the methodology he employs - "recording instances of allowable modification in a closed set of examples and looking for patterns that point to idiomaticity" (p. 182) - produced weak results and that the corpus for historical phraseological research in Old Norse must be expanded in order for future research on phraseology to be productive. The intrinsically text-based nature of historical phraseology makes research more complicated than that involving living languages, as native speakers can provide data on denotations, connotations, mental images and lexicons. Janus argues, however, that studies on phraseological units in Old Norse may lead to an improved understanding of the language. Where authorship is disputed, phraseology may also prove a better method of identifying an author than stylistic or statistical studies.

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