V2 word order in subordinate clauses in spoken Danish

TY - ABST

T1 - V2 word order in subordinate clauses in spoken Danish

AU - Jensen, Torben Juel

AU - Christensen, Tanya Karoli

PY - 2011

Y1 - 2011

N2 - Danish grammatical tradition has it that V2 and V3 word order are signals of the syntacticdifference between main and subordinate clauses. However, several studies have shown thatboth word orders appear in both clause types (Heltoft 2005, Christensen 2007, Jensen forthc.).Though V2 and V3 are asymmetrically distributed, we argue that the word order differenceshould rather be seen as a signal of (subtle) semantic differences. In main clauses, V3 ishighly marked in comparison to V2, and occurs in what may be called emotives. Insubordinate clauses, V2 is marked and signals what has been called ”assertiveness”, but israther a question of foregrounding (cf. Simons 2007: Main Point of Utterance).The paper presents the results of a study of word order in subordinate clauses in contemporaryspoken Danish and focuses on how to include the proposed semantic difference as a factorinfluencing the choice of one variant over another in a (socio)linguistic variable. This is acrucial methodological issue in the study of syntactic variation since variants are hardly eversemantically equivalent in all respects. The study, which is a part of the LANCHART project(www.lanchart.hum.ku.dk), is based on panel studies of two age cohorts of speakers inCopenhagen, recorded in the 1980s and again in 2005-07, and on recent recordings with twoage cohorts of speakers from the western part of Jutland. This makes it possible to studyvariation and change with respect to word order in subordinate clauses in both real andapparent time, as well as geographical variation.The results show that V2 word order in subordinate clauses is much more frequent thancommonly assumed. Furthermore, they indicate that the most decisive factors predicting wordorder in subordinate clauses are the syntactic function of the clause and the type ofsubordinating conjunction, although social and geographical factors also have an impact. Theresults are consistent with the hypothesis that V2 word order is associated with foreground ormain point of utterance, if we accept it as a statistical tendency in language use rather than asan invariant coding.ReferencesChristensen, T. K. 2007. Hyperparadigmer – en undersøgelse af paradigmatiske samspil idanske modussystemer. Institut for kultur og identitet. Roskilde, RoskildeUniversitetscenter. PhD thesis.Heltoft, L. 2005. Ledsætning og letled i dansk. OV-sætningens rester. L. Heltoft, J. Nørgaard-Sørensen & L. Schøsler. Grammatikalisering og struktur. København, MuseumTusculanum.Jensen, Torben Juel forthc. Ordstilling i ledsætninger i moderne dansk talesprog. Ny forskningi grammatik.Simons, M. 2007. Observations on embedding verbs, evidentiality and presupposition. Lingua117 (6), 1034-1056.Vikner, S. 1995. Verb movement and expletive subjects in the Germanic languages. OxfordUniversity Press.

AB - Danish grammatical tradition has it that V2 and V3 word order are signals of the syntacticdifference between main and subordinate clauses. However, several studies have shown thatboth word orders appear in both clause types (Heltoft 2005, Christensen 2007, Jensen forthc.).Though V2 and V3 are asymmetrically distributed, we argue that the word order differenceshould rather be seen as a signal of (subtle) semantic differences. In main clauses, V3 ishighly marked in comparison to V2, and occurs in what may be called emotives. Insubordinate clauses, V2 is marked and signals what has been called ”assertiveness”, but israther a question of foregrounding (cf. Simons 2007: Main Point of Utterance).The paper presents the results of a study of word order in subordinate clauses in contemporaryspoken Danish and focuses on how to include the proposed semantic difference as a factorinfluencing the choice of one variant over another in a (socio)linguistic variable. This is acrucial methodological issue in the study of syntactic variation since variants are hardly eversemantically equivalent in all respects. The study, which is a part of the LANCHART project(www.lanchart.hum.ku.dk), is based on panel studies of two age cohorts of speakers inCopenhagen, recorded in the 1980s and again in 2005-07, and on recent recordings with twoage cohorts of speakers from the western part of Jutland. This makes it possible to studyvariation and change with respect to word order in subordinate clauses in both real andapparent time, as well as geographical variation.The results show that V2 word order in subordinate clauses is much more frequent thancommonly assumed. Furthermore, they indicate that the most decisive factors predicting wordorder in subordinate clauses are the syntactic function of the clause and the type ofsubordinating conjunction, although social and geographical factors also have an impact. Theresults are consistent with the hypothesis that V2 word order is associated with foreground ormain point of utterance, if we accept it as a statistical tendency in language use rather than asan invariant coding.ReferencesChristensen, T. K. 2007. Hyperparadigmer – en undersøgelse af paradigmatiske samspil idanske modussystemer. Institut for kultur og identitet. Roskilde, RoskildeUniversitetscenter. PhD thesis.Heltoft, L. 2005. Ledsætning og letled i dansk. OV-sætningens rester. L. Heltoft, J. Nørgaard-Sørensen & L. Schøsler. Grammatikalisering og struktur. København, MuseumTusculanum.Jensen, Torben Juel forthc. Ordstilling i ledsætninger i moderne dansk talesprog. Ny forskningi grammatik.Simons, M. 2007. Observations on embedding verbs, evidentiality and presupposition. Lingua117 (6), 1034-1056.Vikner, S. 1995. Verb movement and expletive subjects in the Germanic languages. OxfordUniversity Press.

KW - Faculty of Humanities

M3 - Conference abstract for conference

T2 - Main/embedded clause asymmetries in the Scandinav ian Languages

Y2 - 14 April 2011 through 15 April 2011

ER -