This thesis discusses the representation of chivalric ideals in A Game of Thrones and A Clash of Kings from George R. R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire series. The focus is laid on the...Show moreThis thesis discusses the representation of chivalric ideals in A Game of Thrones and A Clash of Kings from George R. R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire series. The focus is laid on the representation of chivalric ideals in the depictions of the Kingsguard and the Night’s Watch. The thesis compares the similarities and differences of their conduct, and analyzes their conduct in comparison to medieval chivalric ideals. Moreover, the thesis attempts to delineate medieval chivalry through discussion of academic studies and Geoffroi de Charny’s Livre de chevalerie. Furthermore, the thesis discusses the influence of post-medieval reproductions of medieval history on the representation of chivalry, and attempts to delineate a more historically accurate representation of medieval chivalry.Show less
Dothraki, one of the fictional languages that features in HBO’s Emmy-award winning TV series Game of Thrones, resembles a natural language in many ways. This thesis is an empirical syntactical...Show moreDothraki, one of the fictional languages that features in HBO’s Emmy-award winning TV series Game of Thrones, resembles a natural language in many ways. This thesis is an empirical syntactical investigation into one of the language’s more idiosyncratic features, namely its double marking of negation. A corpus of 46 negative Dothraki sentences was analysed to determine the position of negation with in a sentence. These results were discussed in reference to a number of theories on the syntax of negation in natural languages. This was done with the ultimate aim of discovering whether negation in Dothraki adheres to the syntactical patterns of natural languages, or whether it is constructed differently and in that way evidence of the language’s artificiality. This thesis ultimately concludes that the double marking of negation in Dothraki can be accounted for by existing theories based on negation in natural languages, arguing that Dothraki resembles languages like Berber in that NegP is the left-most phrase in the split-IP, with the subject in the specifier of TopP.Show less
