Spatial references in Icelandic: the issue of identity

• Main Author: Stephen Leonard
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Subjects: Norway; Iceland
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.555.6350; http://www.ling-phil.ox.ac.uk/events/lingo/abstracts/stephen.leonard.pdf

The role that language played in the establishment of the identity of the settlers to Iceland is poorly understood. One approach to this problem may be to examine the patterns of spatial deictic referenc-ing used by the settlers that came principally from Norway, but also from the British Isles. The reason for focusing on these particular terms is two-fold: there existed in Norse a rich and widely used sys-tem of spatial-directional particles; the use of some of these particles such as locational ablatives may provide insights into how one group of speakers may have identified themselves relative to others. The objective of this paper is to examine not just how the settlers applied spatial deictic and orienta-tion terms to their new geography, but also to study how the Icelanders reapplied these terms subse-quently. In order to understand fully what the use of these terms may tell us about identity, the earliest texts written in Iceland have been analysed across a number of different registers, including the Ice-landic legal corpus, historical texts, saga material and poetry. The sources show us that it is clear that the Norwegian settlers brought with them not only their rich spatial-directional grammar, but a com-plex system of indeterminate orientation terms that were based on the shape of the Norwegian coast line. These terms were re-applied to the geography of Iceland and combined with a system that was