Semantic motivation and syntactic memorability in Old Norse ‘kenningar'

In this chapter are assessed some potentials for synergy between the analysis of a corpus of oral poetry characterized by extreme demands for ambiguity resolution and recent psycholinguistic and computational linguistic research on the subject. Characteristics of Old Norse scaldic verse in dróttkvætt metre are presented for its syntagmatic and lexical practices which generate a high degree of ambiguity only resolvable in late closure. Such ambiguity is significantly enhanced through an interplay of syntactic disjuncture and lexical metonymy within this traditional poetic genre. Although the corpus derives from the pre-literary period of mediaeval Scandinavia, and thus was designed for purely aural reception, on-line monitoring of reading strategies in psycholinguistics have produced results which may prove insightful for the modelling of cognitively realistic paradigms for competence and performance within the ecology native to this discursive genre. In particular, indications of strategic differences between subjects with short- and long-span reading memory in coping with ambiguity, as well as empirical data for the semantic persistence of “garden-path” interpretations beyond successful recourse to syntactic reanalysis, would appear to correlate with interpretative strategies functionally appropriate to the exploratory data derived from the corpus.