Sune Gregersen (he/him)

2025

1. Karrharde Frisian grammar sketch

   Sune Gregersen, and Nora Schulz

   2025

   Unpublished working paper

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2024

1. 

   An evidential perfect in Wangerooge Frisian

   Sune Gregersen

   Acta Linguistica Hafniensia, 2024

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   This paper analyses the use of verbal tense forms in Wangerooge Frisian, a West Germanic language spoken on the Wadden Sea island Wangerooge until the early twentieth century. Specifically, the use of the present, past, and perfect constructions is investigated in a corpus of texts from the nineteenth century. It is argued that the Wangerooge Frisian perfect could be used as a non-firsthand evidential strategy marking the propositional content as hearsay or inferred. While such evidential perfects are cross-linguistically well attested, they are generally thought to be uncommon in Western European languages. The Wangerooge Frisian case thus shows the value of lesser-studied vernaculars for the typology of European languages.

   @article{gregersen2024evid,
     title = {An evidential perfect in Wangerooge Frisian},
     author = {Gregersen, Sune},
     journal = {Acta Linguistica Hafniensia},
     volume = {56},
     pages = {1--30},
     doi = {10.1080/03740463.2024.2359804},
     year = {2024},
   }

2. 

   An overlooked source of Wangerooge Frisian: The birthday invitation of Louwine Luths

   Sune Gregersen

   Us Wurk, 2024

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   The paper presents and discusses a hitherto overlooked text in Wangerooge Frisian, a short birthday invitation written in 1934 by the native speaker Louwine Luths. The text was first published in the members’ bulletin of a local genealogical society, which is currently only available in print in a few German archives. In the paper I re-publish the birthday invitation – along with another short fragment of Wangerooge Frisian from the bulletin – and discuss a number of salient linguistic features. The two short texts are of particular interest because they were written down by native speakers of Wangerooge Frisian.

   @article{gregersen2024usw,
     title = {An overlooked source of Wangerooge Frisian: The birthday invitation of Louwine Luths},
     author = {Gregersen, Sune},
     journal = {Us Wurk},
     volume = {73},
     pages = {49--64},
     doi = {10.21827/uw.73.49-64},
     year = {2024},
   }

2023

1. 

   Restrictions on past-tense passives in Late Modern Danish

   Sune Gregersen

   Open Linguistics, 2023

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   This article investigates a case of lexical restrictions on a voice construction, specifically Danish past-tense passives. Present-Day Danish has both a periphrastic and an inflectional passive construction, but in the past tense, most ablaut (strong) verbs cannot form the inflectional passive (e.g. *skreves ‘was written’, *bares ‘was carried’). Various explanations for these restrictions have been proposed in the literature, but their historical background has not been investigated in any detail. This article focusses on the passive restrictions in Late Modern Danish, using various sources mainly from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It is shown that while lexical restrictions on the past-tense s-passive are already mentioned in eighteenth and nineteenthcentury grammars, the grammaticality of the individual forms has changed; for instance, the now obsolete form skreves ‘was written’ is attested in several Late Modern Danish sources. Furthermore, the primary sources differ greatly with respect to their use of the passive in the past tense. I suggest that sociolinguistic variables, such as level of education and formality of the texts, must be taken into account when trying to explain the development of the Danish passive, and that the lexical restrictions on past-tense s-passives may in fact be a side effect of standardization in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

   @article{gregersen2023passive,
     title = {Restrictions on past-tense passives in Late Modern Danish},
     author = {Gregersen, Sune},
     journal = {Open Linguistics},
     volume = {9},
     year = {2023},
     doi = {10.1515/opli-2022-0196}
   }

2. 

   Regularized modal verbs in Middle English dialects

   Sune Gregersen

   English Language and Linguistics, 2023

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   The article investigates an overlooked development in the history of the English modals, namely the regularization of their plural inflection in Middle English (e.g. PRS.IND.PL shulleþ for expected shullen). Using the LAEME and eLALME atlases and a number of electronic corpora, I document the frequency and dialectal distribution of such regularized modal verbs. It is shown that regularized SHALL was fairly common in Late Middle English, regularized CAN less so, and regularized MAY only very sporadically attested. The distribution of these forms shows a clear areal pattern, being most numerous in manuscripts from the southwest Midlands. I suggest that the most likely explanation for the observed patterns is interparadigmatic analogy with the ‘anomalous’ verb WILL, which in some dialects had developed the same stem vowel as plural SHALL.

   @article{gregersen2023regmod,
     title = {Regularized modal verbs in Middle English dialects},
     author = {Gregersen, Sune},
     journal = {English Language and Linguistics},
     volume = {27},
     number = {1},
     pages = {23--43},
     year = {2023},
     doi = {10.1017/S1360674322000053}
   }