Frasar til besvær? Studiar av norm og bruk i norsk fraseologi

Abstract

The dissertation deals with set phrases in the two written standards of Norwegian, viz. Bokmål and Nynorsk. Phraseology has not been a field of extensive research in Norwegian linguistics, and the present work deals with some of the fundamental aspects regarding norm, represented by dictionaries, and observable language use in the two varieties. The first half of the dissertation aims at establishing a background for the interpretation and explanation of phraseological differences in two written varieties of the same language.

The second part of the dissertation consists of two empirical studies. The first study has a broad perspective and aims to survey variation in the form of 54 phrases. Their treatment in four Norwegian dictionaries is compared to their use as documented in corpora of written Bokmål and Nynorsk. Due to the quite unique linguistic situation with two written varieties, both exhibiting considerable internal orthographical and morphological variation, phraseological variation in lexicon, orthography, morphology and syntax is widespread. Besides, one can observe a growing acceptance among many Norwegian language users, especially of Nynorsk, to exploit elements from their local dialects in their written texts – leading to even more phraseological variation.

The second empirical work is an in-depth study of variation, creative modification and divergent use of kaste barnet ut med badevatnet (‘throw out the baby with the bathwater’). The study is based on 460 unique examples in Bokmål and 373 examples in Nynorsk excerpted from 10 different text corpora and other digital text collections. The phrase is open to substitution of almost all of its components and allows most kinds of syntactic transformatio without losing its meaning. The differences between Bokmål and Nynorsk in how the phrase is used have decreased through time, but the use of creative modification has increased in both varieties.