A casual examination of the skaldic corpus suggests that a very large proportion of kennings are unique, that is, the nouns that form a kenning are very unlikely to appear elsewhere as a kenning, even when grammatical variation is taken into account. This enormous productivity is due to the principle of variability and substitution in kennings. The phenomenon is discussed in Fidjestøl’s 1974 structural analysis of the kenning system and presented there as a reversal of the principle of linguistic economy. This paper investigates this phenomenon by quantitatively analysing the kenning corpus as recorded in the skaldic database, in order to identify matching kennings within the corpus. The results are broken down according to the complexity of the kennings in question and are then examined in relation to the structural framework of the kenning system. It is shown, firstly, that a relatively small number of kennings are repeated (10–12 % of kennings are repeated), but that there is a fairly high amount of repetition among simple kennings (at least 25 % of simple kennings are found elsewhere in the corpus), suggesting that the kenning system has quantitative similarities with other linguistic systems, albeit with a much higher level of variability.

中文翻译：

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肯宁斯和变异性

随便检查一下skaldic语料库，可以发现很大比例的词义是唯一的，也就是说，即使考虑到语法变化，构成词义的名词也不太可能作为词义出现在其他地方。如此高的生产率归功于可变性和肯宁替代的原理。这种现象在Fidjestøl于1974年对肯宁体系的结构分析中进行了讨论，并在此作为语言经济原理的逆转出现。本文通过定量分析skaldic数据库中记录的kenning语料库来研究此现象，以识别语料库中的匹配kennings。根据所涉及的肯宁的复杂性将结果分解，然后针对肯宁系统的结构框架进行检查。首先表明，重复的kenning相对较少（重复的kenning的10–12％），但是在简单kenning之间存在相当多的重复（至少在其他地方发现25％的简单kenning）语料库），这表明垦宁系统与其他语言系统在数量上具有相似性，尽管变异性更高。