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Anyone familiar with the Modern Icelandic language will know that the country?s policy is to avoid borrowing lexemes from other languages, and instead to draw on their own vocabulary. This often results in the formation of a word pair, consisting of a loanword and its respective native equivalent, as the process of borrowing systematically eludes the tight tangles of language policy. But how did this phenomenon develop in the Middle Ages, before a purist ideology was formed?00This volume offers a unique analysis of a previously unexplored area of Old Norse linguistics by investigating the way in which loanwords and native synonyms interacted in the Middle Ages. Through a linguistic-philological investigation of texts from all medieval Icelandic prose genres, the book maps out the strategies by which the variation and interplay between loanwords and native words were manifested in medieval Iceland and suggests that it is possible to identify the same dynamics in other languages with a comparable literary tradition. In doing so, new light is shed on language development and usage in the Middle Ages, and the gap between case-study and general linguistic theory is bridged over.

Icelandic language --- Old Norse language --- Foreign elements. --- Foreign words and phrases.

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Valency patterns and valency orientation have been frequent topics of research under different perspectives, often poorly connected. Diachronic studies on these topics is even less systematic than synchronic ones. The papers in this book bring together two strands of research on valency, i.e. the description of valency patterns as worked out in the Leipzig Valency Classes Project (ValPaL), and the assessment of a language's basic valency and its possible orientation. Notably, the ValPaL does not provide diachronic information concerning the valency patterns investigated: one of the aims of the book is to supplement the available data with data from historical stages of languages, in order to make it profitably exploitable for diachronic research. In addition, new research on the diachrony of basic valency and valency alternations can deepen our understanding of mechanisms of language change and of the propensity of languages or language families to exploit different constructional patterns related to transitivity.

LANGUAGE ARTS & DISCIPLINES / Linguistics / General. --- Language Change. --- Transitivity. --- Valency. --- Voice.