Homonymy and syntactic contamination: Old Norse-Icelandic and Old Swedish at

Abstract

The paper studies the evolution of the uses of at in Old Norse-Icelandic and in Old Swedish. It provides a description of its different functions (preposition, adverb, infinitive particle, and conjunction) and discusses their origins as well as the consequences of this extreme polyfunctionality: contamination between uses in Icelandic, and phonetic differentiation and avoidance in Swedish