Constructional change in North American Danish transitional verbs: The case of var født/konfirmeret/gift

TY - GEN

T1 - Constructional change in North American Danish transitional verbs: The case of var født/konfirmeret/gift

AU - Kühl, Karoline

PY - 2018

Y1 - 2018

N2 - This paper focuses on structural changes in Danish as an immigrant minority language in North America, i.e., language change under the conditions of language contact. Two corpora, the Corpus of North American Danish and the LANCHART corpus (both University of Copenhagen), provide data for a contrastive analysis of auxiliary choice in three verb phrases with transitional biographical verbs (født 'born', konfirmeret 'confirmed' and gift 'married') in North American Danish and modern spoken Danish. Taking a Construction Grammar approach, the author argues that the changes in auxiliary choice, namely the use of var 'was' instead of blev 'became', are the result of cross-linguistic analogy building by the bilingual speakers of North American Danish. The analogical leveling of North American Danish with English leads to constructional change in form and function as well as in frequency and prototype.

AB - This paper focuses on structural changes in Danish as an immigrant minority language in North America, i.e., language change under the conditions of language contact. Two corpora, the Corpus of North American Danish and the LANCHART corpus (both University of Copenhagen), provide data for a contrastive analysis of auxiliary choice in three verb phrases with transitional biographical verbs (født 'born', konfirmeret 'confirmed' and gift 'married') in North American Danish and modern spoken Danish. Taking a Construction Grammar approach, the author argues that the changes in auxiliary choice, namely the use of var 'was' instead of blev 'became', are the result of cross-linguistic analogy building by the bilingual speakers of North American Danish. The analogical leveling of North American Danish with English leads to constructional change in form and function as well as in frequency and prototype.

UR - http://www.lingref.com/cpp/wila/8/index.html

M3 - Article in proceedings

T3 - Cascadilla Proceedings Project

SP - 63

EP - 70

BT - Selected proceedings of the 8th Workshop on Immigrant Languages in the Americas, 2017

A2 - Kühl, Karoline

A2 - Heegård Petersen, Jan

A2 - Bondi Johannessen, Janne

A2 - Putnam, Michael

PB - Cascadilla

CY - Somerville, MA, USA

ER -