Danish Grammar

The Danish pronoun de and its inflections are traditionally described as 3rd person plural, but, as this article demonstrates, it is also used as a gender neutral 3rd person singular pronoun. As this pronoun - termed singular de - has not been documented or described in the literature thus far, the purpose of this article is to provide a grammatical description and analysis of singular de and its referential use in interaction. This is based on 104 occurrences of singular de in naturally occurring conversation. It is found that singular de is used with both generic and specific reference, and that interlocutors may use singular de to avoid indexing gender and orienting to it as a relevant topic in talk-in-interaction (gender-unspecified reference) or to index the referent's gender as neither male nor female (gender-specified reference). The article also parallels between singular de and English singular they, as well as sociolinguistic variation in the use of singular de which could be topics for future studies.

The Danish language, like many other 'Western' languages, does not have any human-referent gender neutral third person singular pronoun that is "officially" recognized in the sense that it is taught in language classes, used in public documents, or included in most dictionaries. Nevertheless, many individuals prefer being referred to with pronouns that do not designate that individual as either female or male, which prompts linguistic innovation and creativity. This article is a pilot study presenting the initial results of a 7-question survey investigating the use of gender neutral and nonbinary/genderqueer pronouns in Danish. Based on 75 responses, it is found that the pronouns most people prefer others to refer to them with are de 'they' (the third person plural), den 'it' (the third person singular common gender, conventionally used to refer to objects and non-pet animals), and hen (third person singular neologism), as well as hun 'she' and han 'he'. The survey targeted two groups of respondents: 1) Nonbinary/genderqueer individuals and 2) Women and men who wish to be referred to with pronouns other than hun/han. The final section of the article suggests several topics for further research of gender neutral and nonbinary/genderqueer pronouns, both in Danish and in other languages.

The Danish pronoun de and its inflections are traditionally described as 3rd person plural, but, as this article demonstrates, it is also used as a gender neutral 3rd person singular pronoun. As this pronoun – termed singular de – has not been documented or described in the literature thus far, the purpose of this article is to provide a grammatical description and analysis of singular de and its referential use in interaction. This is based on 104 occurrences of singular de in naturally occurring conversation. It is found that singular de is used with both generic and specific reference, and that interlocutors may use singular de to avoid indexing gender and orienting to it as a relevant topic in talk-in- interaction (gender-unspecified reference) or to index the referent’s gender as neither male nor female (gender-specified reference). The article also parallels between singular de and English singular they, as well as sociolinguistic variation in the use of singular de which coul...

The Danish word øv is traditionally categorized as an interjection. However, in a set of data primarily from chat conversations, several instances of øv do not match any traditional definition of interjections: It is syntactically integrated and thus does not constitute a full utterance on its own, and its semantic-pragmatic use is more nuanced than “expressing an aspect of the speaker’s mental state”. Th e main part of the article is a functionally-based analysis of these instances of øv, the insights from which are used to question the general practice of lexical categorization. I argue that a pragmatically based model of categorization is better able to account for the full range of uses for a word form.

The Danish word øv is traditionally categorized as an interjection. However, in a set of data primarily from chat conversations, several instances of øv do not match any traditional defi nition of interjections: It is syntactically integrated and thus does not constitute a full utterance on its own, and its semantic-pragmatic use is more nuanced than "expressing an aspect of the speaker's mental state". The main part of the article is a functionally-based analysis of these instances of øv, the insights from which are used to question the general practice of lexical categorization. I argue that a pragmatically based model of categorization is better able to account for the full range of uses for a word form.

This paper presents results of a research study the objective of which was to analyse entries of Polish temporal propositions and their Danish equivalents. Having considered specific features of the examined class of words, the following three parameters were chosen as quality references: number of exemplary phrases, number of Danish preposition equivalents and order of examples given in the entry. Excerpts of dictionary articles were additionally compared with results of other translation confrontation.

Freek Van de Velde's article "Wayward categorial shift: so odd an article" deals with an intriguing construction, whereby the degree adverb 'so' and an adjective precede an indefinite article, which is found in several (older) Germanic languages. Such Big Mess Constructions (hence BMCs) differ from canonical NPs because the adjective usually follows an article, instead of preceding it. This observation, as well as the fact that BMCs are found in several Germanic languages at some stage of their history, begs for an explanation. Van de Velde claims the rise of the BMC is "merely the result of an historical accident", a categorial shift through reanalysis that was triggered by the phonological similarity of an adjectival suffix and the indefinite article following the adjective. The purpose of the present paper is to examine if Van de Velde's reanalysis hypothesis holds for Danish as well. As we will see, Danish is particularly interesting for this purpose, firstly, because the Big Mess Construction is still fully productive and secondly, because the historical circumstances for the kind of reanalysis assumed for Dutch and English appeared to be less favourable.

The article introduces a new website, samtalegrammatik.dk ('grammar of talk-in-interaction'), it describes the methods used for constructing the website, and it provides descriptions of three new grammatical phenomena in Danish talk-in-interaction. The website is a result of investigations carried out by the research group DanTIN ('Danish talk-in-interaction') since 2009. Until 2013, the group has published analyses of quite diverse phenomena, such as different versions of the word hvad 'what' that seem to belong to different word classes and have different functions in talk-ininteraction, the distribution of the hesitation marker oh(m) 'uh(m)', or different word orders after the conjunction fordi ('because'). These phenomena were selected because they were clearly different from written Danish. By launching the website samtalegrammatik.dk the group takes a step towards building a comprehensive grammar of Danish talk-in-interaction. It offers ...