Frans Gregersen is a former professor of Danish Language at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark and the former director of the DNRF LANCHART Centre (2005-2015). 2014-2018 he directed a project on Danish Voices in the Americas, in particular the USA and Argentina. 2018-2022 he was chairman of the advisory board of InfraStructuralism and 2023-2026 he is the chairman of the steering committee of NordUng, a project on applying a Nordic perspective in Secondary education in Denmark, Norway and Sweden. Supervisors: Frans Gregersen was educated by Niels Ege, Una Canger, Eli Fischer-Jørgensen, Hans Basbøll and Henning Spang-Hanssen
Eli Fischer-Jorgensen was born February 11, 1911, in Nakskov, Denmark; she is a prominent Danish ... more Eli Fischer-Jorgensen was born February 11, 1911, in Nakskov, Denmark; she is a prominent Danish phonologist and phonetician.
Viggo Brondal studied with Sandfeld and Nyrop at the University of Copenhagen and graduated as ma... more Viggo Brondal studied with Sandfeld and Nyrop at the University of Copenhagen and graduated as magister artium in Romance Philology in 1912. As a postgraduate, Brondal studied with Bedier and Meillet in Paris for a year. In 1917 he was awarded the degree of Doctor of Philosophy by the University of Copenhagen for a dissertation on loans and substratum influences in Romance and Germanic languages. From 1917 to 1925 he worked as an assistant to the Place-Name Committee by, and then returned to Paris for a three-year period where he was a reader of Danish at the Sorbonne. In 1928 he was appointed Professor of Romance Philology at the University of Copenhagen, a position that he held until his death in 1942. Brondal was a key figure in the foundation and early life of the Linguistic Circle of Copenhagen.
In this paper, I argue that linguistics is a historical science in more than one sense: Not only ... more In this paper, I argue that linguistics is a historical science in more than one sense: Not only is the object, language, embedded in time, but so is the study of it. This has consequences for our conception of language change. A central result of previous sociolinguistic analyses of spoken Copenhagen Danish, starting with Brink & Lund 1975, is that during the latter half of the 19th century the common European low back vowel (a) was differentiated in the Copenhagen speech community into at least four different vowel qualities all of them bearing both linguistic and sociolinguistic information. I present evidence from an unbroken chain of Copenhagen informants ranging from birth years 1905 until 1962–71. Various sections of this sample have been studied by different researchers using auditory classification of variants, and the total sample has been coded once more by the LANCHART centre. The analysis shows that auditory coding reveals the same patterns of differences between sociologically characterized groups but the relative figures classified as belonging to the various variants diverge quite dramatically and seem to be dependent on the age of the coder and the point in time at which the coding takes place. I suggest explanations for these facts and discuss whether this is a problem for the validity of sociolinguistic research or perhaps an inescapable condition for research within the language sciences.
1. Introduction (by Gregersen, Frans) 2. Where does the social stop? (by Eckert, Penelope) 3. The... more 1. Introduction (by Gregersen, Frans) 2. Where does the social stop? (by Eckert, Penelope) 3. The role of intonation in Austrian listeners' perceptions of standard-dialect shifting (by Feizollahi, Zhaleh) 4. Hybridity and ethnic accents: A sociophonetic analysis of 'Glaswasian' (by Stuart-Smith, Jane) 5. A contact-linguistic view on Finland-Swedish quotatives vara, 'be', and att, 'that' (by Henricson, Sofie) 6. Quotations and quotatives in the speech of three Danish generations (by Rathje, Marianne) 7. The role of information structure in linguistic variation: Evidence from a German multiethnolect (by Wiese, Heike) 8. "Oh, they're top, them": Right dislocated tags and interactional stance (by Moore, Emma) 9. Changing the world vs. changing the mind: Distinctive collexeme analysis of the causative construction with doen in Belgian and Netherlandic Dutch (by Levshina, Natalia) 10. Variation in long-distance dependencies (by Schippers, Ankelien) 11. Reconciling corpus and questionnaire data in microcomparative syntax: A case study from North Germanic (by Vangsnes, Oystein Alexander) 12. "Judge not lest ye be judged": Exploring methods for the collection of socio-syntactic data (by Buchstaller, Isabelle) 13. Corpus-based variation studies - A methodology (by Ruus, Hanne) 14. Dialect convergence across language boundaries: A challenge for areal linguistics (by Hoder, Steffen) 15. The role of morphology in phonological change: Rethinking diffusion theory (by Kunnas, Niina) 16. Spelling variants of the present participle in a selection of Northern English and Scots texts of the late 14th and the 15th centuries (by Gardela, Wojciech) 17. Collocations, attitudes, and English loan words in Finnish (by Tamminen-Parre, Saija) 18. The variety and richness of words for relatives in Slovene (by Jakop, Tjasa) 19. "A den of iniquity" or "The hotbed of civilization"? Urban areas as locations for linguistic studies in Norway: A historiographical perspective (by Maehlum, Brit) 20. Index
Variationslingvistik i Norden – språkförändringsprocesser i dagens samhälle Ett symposium till minne av Bengt Nordberg Uppsala den 31 mars och 1 april 2022, 2023
Sociolingvistikken i Norden repraesenterer et opbrud og et nybrud. Vi skal i første afsnit af den... more Sociolingvistikken i Norden repraesenterer et opbrud og et nybrud. Vi skal i første afsnit af denne artikel belyse den kontekst efterkrigstidens lingvistik udgjorde for nybruddet, dvs. hvad Bengt Nordberg og hans kampfaeller i de andre nordiske lande brød op fra, og i andet afsnit hvad nyt de i faellesskab indførte. I den sidste del opsummeres i forhold til hvor vi står i dag; vi står under alle omstaendigheder på skuldrene af giganter.
Structuralism as one - structuralism as many, 2023
The paper contrasts the careers, theories and organizational contributions made by Roman Jakobson... more The paper contrasts the careers, theories and organizational contributions made by Roman Jakobson and Louis Hjelmslev respectively. Though both are prominent structuralists, they diverged on several important points as to their views of theories and language. Their histories are intertwined because they fought for supremacy in the field of linguistics and collaborated on the journal Acta Linguistica. Their different views were, however, not fully expressed in the 1930s since an important paper by Hjelmslev was suppressed and remained unpublished until 1973. During Jakobson's escape from Czechoslovakia Hjelmslev was instrumental in bringing Jakobson and his wife to Denmark where he worked for half a year before going on to Norway. We document the various meeting points and divergences as well as the close friendship which despite their theoretical differences united them.
Ud fra en kritik af den empiriske forskning som tager eksperimentet som sin foretrukne dataindsam... more Ud fra en kritik af den empiriske forskning som tager eksperimentet som sin foretrukne dataindsamlingsteknik skitseres en modsætning mellem ordet som analyseenhed og betydningsstrukturer som de opstår i en verbal interaktion i situationen som analysens objekt. Modstillingen, som hos V.N. Volosjinoff (1929 (1973)) knyttes til en modsætning mellem et romantisk paradigme og et abstraherende objektiviserende ditto, kan genfindes i sprogforskningen som en modsætning mellem pragmatiske og leksikologiske analyseformer. Forfatteren argumenterer for at studiet af betydningsstrukturer af en dybde, så de kan kvalificere sig som empirisk belæg for ideologier, er en opgave for en antropologisk inspireret sociolingvistik.
Denne artikel præsenterer, og behandler yderligere, problemstillinger som har været diskuteret i ... more Denne artikel præsenterer, og behandler yderligere, problemstillinger som har været diskuteret i løbet af den periode hvor det Nordplus-finansierede netværk for læreruddannelser i Norden, Nordisk Nabosprogsdidaktik og Nabosprogskommunikation i Læreruddannelserne, har arbejdet med nordisk sprogdidaktik.Edite
Structuralism as one - structuralism as many, 2023
The paper contrasts the careers, theories and organizational contributions made by Roman Jakobson... more The paper contrasts the careers, theories and organizational contributions made by Roman Jakobson and Louis Hjelmslev respectively. Though both are prominent structuralists, they diverged on several important points as to their views of theories and language. Their histories are intertwined because they fought for supremacy in the field of linguistics and collaborated on the journal Acta Linguistica. Their different views were, however, not fully expressed in the 1930s since an important paper by Hjelmslev was suppressed and remained unpublished until 1973. During Jakobson’s escape from Czechoslovakia Hjelmslev was instrumental in bringing Jakobson and his wife to Denmark where he worked for half a year before going on to Norway. We document the various meeting points and divergences as well as the close friendship which despite their theoretical differences united them.
Eli Fischer-Jorgensen was born February 11, 1911, in Nakskov, Denmark; she is a prominent Danish ... more Eli Fischer-Jorgensen was born February 11, 1911, in Nakskov, Denmark; she is a prominent Danish phonologist and phonetician.
Viggo Brondal studied with Sandfeld and Nyrop at the University of Copenhagen and graduated as ma... more Viggo Brondal studied with Sandfeld and Nyrop at the University of Copenhagen and graduated as magister artium in Romance Philology in 1912. As a postgraduate, Brondal studied with Bedier and Meillet in Paris for a year. In 1917 he was awarded the degree of Doctor of Philosophy by the University of Copenhagen for a dissertation on loans and substratum influences in Romance and Germanic languages. From 1917 to 1925 he worked as an assistant to the Place-Name Committee by, and then returned to Paris for a three-year period where he was a reader of Danish at the Sorbonne. In 1928 he was appointed Professor of Romance Philology at the University of Copenhagen, a position that he held until his death in 1942. Brondal was a key figure in the foundation and early life of the Linguistic Circle of Copenhagen.
In this paper, I argue that linguistics is a historical science in more than one sense: Not only ... more In this paper, I argue that linguistics is a historical science in more than one sense: Not only is the object, language, embedded in time, but so is the study of it. This has consequences for our conception of language change. A central result of previous sociolinguistic analyses of spoken Copenhagen Danish, starting with Brink & Lund 1975, is that during the latter half of the 19th century the common European low back vowel (a) was differentiated in the Copenhagen speech community into at least four different vowel qualities all of them bearing both linguistic and sociolinguistic information. I present evidence from an unbroken chain of Copenhagen informants ranging from birth years 1905 until 1962–71. Various sections of this sample have been studied by different researchers using auditory classification of variants, and the total sample has been coded once more by the LANCHART centre. The analysis shows that auditory coding reveals the same patterns of differences between sociologically characterized groups but the relative figures classified as belonging to the various variants diverge quite dramatically and seem to be dependent on the age of the coder and the point in time at which the coding takes place. I suggest explanations for these facts and discuss whether this is a problem for the validity of sociolinguistic research or perhaps an inescapable condition for research within the language sciences.
1. Introduction (by Gregersen, Frans) 2. Where does the social stop? (by Eckert, Penelope) 3. The... more 1. Introduction (by Gregersen, Frans) 2. Where does the social stop? (by Eckert, Penelope) 3. The role of intonation in Austrian listeners' perceptions of standard-dialect shifting (by Feizollahi, Zhaleh) 4. Hybridity and ethnic accents: A sociophonetic analysis of 'Glaswasian' (by Stuart-Smith, Jane) 5. A contact-linguistic view on Finland-Swedish quotatives vara, 'be', and att, 'that' (by Henricson, Sofie) 6. Quotations and quotatives in the speech of three Danish generations (by Rathje, Marianne) 7. The role of information structure in linguistic variation: Evidence from a German multiethnolect (by Wiese, Heike) 8. "Oh, they're top, them": Right dislocated tags and interactional stance (by Moore, Emma) 9. Changing the world vs. changing the mind: Distinctive collexeme analysis of the causative construction with doen in Belgian and Netherlandic Dutch (by Levshina, Natalia) 10. Variation in long-distance dependencies (by Schippers, Ankelien) 11. Reconciling corpus and questionnaire data in microcomparative syntax: A case study from North Germanic (by Vangsnes, Oystein Alexander) 12. "Judge not lest ye be judged": Exploring methods for the collection of socio-syntactic data (by Buchstaller, Isabelle) 13. Corpus-based variation studies - A methodology (by Ruus, Hanne) 14. Dialect convergence across language boundaries: A challenge for areal linguistics (by Hoder, Steffen) 15. The role of morphology in phonological change: Rethinking diffusion theory (by Kunnas, Niina) 16. Spelling variants of the present participle in a selection of Northern English and Scots texts of the late 14th and the 15th centuries (by Gardela, Wojciech) 17. Collocations, attitudes, and English loan words in Finnish (by Tamminen-Parre, Saija) 18. The variety and richness of words for relatives in Slovene (by Jakop, Tjasa) 19. "A den of iniquity" or "The hotbed of civilization"? Urban areas as locations for linguistic studies in Norway: A historiographical perspective (by Maehlum, Brit) 20. Index
Variationslingvistik i Norden – språkförändringsprocesser i dagens samhälle Ett symposium till minne av Bengt Nordberg Uppsala den 31 mars och 1 april 2022, 2023
Sociolingvistikken i Norden repraesenterer et opbrud og et nybrud. Vi skal i første afsnit af den... more Sociolingvistikken i Norden repraesenterer et opbrud og et nybrud. Vi skal i første afsnit af denne artikel belyse den kontekst efterkrigstidens lingvistik udgjorde for nybruddet, dvs. hvad Bengt Nordberg og hans kampfaeller i de andre nordiske lande brød op fra, og i andet afsnit hvad nyt de i faellesskab indførte. I den sidste del opsummeres i forhold til hvor vi står i dag; vi står under alle omstaendigheder på skuldrene af giganter.
Structuralism as one - structuralism as many, 2023
The paper contrasts the careers, theories and organizational contributions made by Roman Jakobson... more The paper contrasts the careers, theories and organizational contributions made by Roman Jakobson and Louis Hjelmslev respectively. Though both are prominent structuralists, they diverged on several important points as to their views of theories and language. Their histories are intertwined because they fought for supremacy in the field of linguistics and collaborated on the journal Acta Linguistica. Their different views were, however, not fully expressed in the 1930s since an important paper by Hjelmslev was suppressed and remained unpublished until 1973. During Jakobson's escape from Czechoslovakia Hjelmslev was instrumental in bringing Jakobson and his wife to Denmark where he worked for half a year before going on to Norway. We document the various meeting points and divergences as well as the close friendship which despite their theoretical differences united them.
Ud fra en kritik af den empiriske forskning som tager eksperimentet som sin foretrukne dataindsam... more Ud fra en kritik af den empiriske forskning som tager eksperimentet som sin foretrukne dataindsamlingsteknik skitseres en modsætning mellem ordet som analyseenhed og betydningsstrukturer som de opstår i en verbal interaktion i situationen som analysens objekt. Modstillingen, som hos V.N. Volosjinoff (1929 (1973)) knyttes til en modsætning mellem et romantisk paradigme og et abstraherende objektiviserende ditto, kan genfindes i sprogforskningen som en modsætning mellem pragmatiske og leksikologiske analyseformer. Forfatteren argumenterer for at studiet af betydningsstrukturer af en dybde, så de kan kvalificere sig som empirisk belæg for ideologier, er en opgave for en antropologisk inspireret sociolingvistik.
Denne artikel præsenterer, og behandler yderligere, problemstillinger som har været diskuteret i ... more Denne artikel præsenterer, og behandler yderligere, problemstillinger som har været diskuteret i løbet af den periode hvor det Nordplus-finansierede netværk for læreruddannelser i Norden, Nordisk Nabosprogsdidaktik og Nabosprogskommunikation i Læreruddannelserne, har arbejdet med nordisk sprogdidaktik.Edite
Structuralism as one - structuralism as many, 2023
The paper contrasts the careers, theories and organizational contributions made by Roman Jakobson... more The paper contrasts the careers, theories and organizational contributions made by Roman Jakobson and Louis Hjelmslev respectively. Though both are prominent structuralists, they diverged on several important points as to their views of theories and language. Their histories are intertwined because they fought for supremacy in the field of linguistics and collaborated on the journal Acta Linguistica. Their different views were, however, not fully expressed in the 1930s since an important paper by Hjelmslev was suppressed and remained unpublished until 1973. During Jakobson’s escape from Czechoslovakia Hjelmslev was instrumental in bringing Jakobson and his wife to Denmark where he worked for half a year before going on to Norway. We document the various meeting points and divergences as well as the close friendship which despite their theoretical differences united them.
Rasmus Rask is one of the founding fathers of comparative linguistics. He was concerned with phon... more Rasmus Rask is one of the founding fathers of comparative linguistics. He was concerned with phonetics precisely because he wanted to be able to compare language data irrespective of their written form so that the data compared were those that reflected the sound structure of the spoken language and not the orthographical traditions. For that reason his conception of phonetics was closer to morphophonology than to a surface representation of speech.
A grant given by the A.P. Møller Foundation, the Carlsberg Foundation and the University of Copen... more A grant given by the A.P. Møller Foundation, the Carlsberg Foundation and the University of Copenhagen in 2014 has made it possible for a group of researchers at the University of Copenhagen LANCHART Centre to study the use of Danish by immigrants to the United States and Argentina in the previous century. For the USA there were sufficiently detailed recordings of good quality thanks to previous projects. For Argentina, however, no recordings could be identified. Thus we had to carry out extensive field work and the project has to date assembled data from more than 100 informants who speak various degrees of fluent Danish. The purpose of this presentation is to introduce two major issues that we have encountered and solved during the preliminary work on the recordings. The first one has to do with the status of loans, borrowings and calques from the surrounding society's language (in this case English and Spanish) and the baseline of reference for comparisons between the Danish spoken outside Denmark and the Danish spoken in Denmark. The second one has to do with the difference in status between Spanish and English in the Danish of today and the consequences for the project. In both cases the issue of borrowing remains central: Obviously, modern Danish has borrowed a number of lexical items from English, cf. Rathje 2008. A discussion has raged about whether Modern Danish has also borrowed some syntactic constructions (Sørensen 1997, Galberg Jacobsen 1994) and the fact remains that it is extremely difficult to decide whether new ways of using Danish have or have not been inspired by similar constructions in English (calques). This makes comparisons between Danish spoken in the USA and Danish spoken in Denmark more complicated since a simple count of Danish versus English words will not do justice to the situation. On the other hand, we have to start with word counting. Here the crux is which words are possible in both languages (loans (and homographs in so far as they cannot be disambiguated using part of speech tagging)), i.e. Danish and English, and which are in fact hybrids, i.e. words with a Danish stem and English morphology or vice versa. A number of those decisions have to be taken already in the phase of transcription. The group has developed a system of transcription whereby it is comparatively easy to establish profiles for each speaker detailing the number of unambiguously Danish word forms used, the number of unambiguously English word forms used and the number of ambiguous word forms as well as hybrids used. Counted separately for each informant this should give us a reliable index for each speaker's command of the two languages as repertoires. As to Spanish the situation is very different. Very few words have been borrowed directly from Spanish into the Danish spoken in Denmark and thus we may be sure that Spanish words used in the Danish of Argentina Danes stem from the present surroundings. But a new problem arises stemming from the common core of Latin words in European languages. Thus Danish – as is the case with all European languages-has a layer of word forms which stem from Latin and this layer is not perceived as loans (any longer? ever?). But that does not mean that you are completely free to create new word forms such as the Argentine Danish: funktionere (for Danish fungere cf. Swedish funktionera) = Eng. function, jubileret (for Danish pensioneret = Eng. retired). Examples (courtesy of PhD student NN) could be multiplied. Here we have completely Danish phonology but the word form does not 'exist' in Danish. It would be possible, but is has not occurred to any Dane (yet? ever?) to create it. The point is that the two different types of contact between Danish and English on the one hand and Danish and Spanish on the other make for quite different analyses and quite different resulting Danish lects.
In the PP you will find a presentation of the project Danish Voices in the Americas, focussing on... more In the PP you will find a presentation of the project Danish Voices in the Americas, focussing on old recordings with first, second and n'th generation Danish immigrants to the United States and new recordings of n'th generation Danish immigrants to Argentina.
What would have happened if Basil Bernstein's code theory had been accepted as the basis for the ... more What would have happened if Basil Bernstein's code theory had been accepted as the basis for the future discipline of sociolinguistics. This is an exercise in counterfactual history writing-
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