Sune Gregersen

I am a descriptive and comparative linguist working as a research fellow at the Department of Frisian Studies, Kiel University. My research currently focusses on Wangerooge Frisian, a now extinct minority language of Northern Germany. My goal is to publish a grammar of the language based on a substantial text corpus collected in the 19th and early 20th century.

Before coming to Germany, I studied linguistics at the University of Copenhagen and wrote my dissertation on the development of the English modals at the University of Amsterdam. Among other things, I have also worked on grammatical change in 19th-century Danish and habitual constructions (like English used to) in the languages of the world.

On this website you can read about my research and find most of my papers and presentations for download. If you cannot find what you are looking for – or if you have any questions or comments – you are always welcome to send me an email.

Selected publications

2024

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}, }
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

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} }
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} }

2020

Early English modals: Form, function, and analogy

Sune Gregersen

2020

PhD dissertation, University of Amsterdam

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This book concerns the early history of the English modals, in particular their morphosyntactic and semantic development in the Old English (c. AD 800–1100) and Middle English (c. AD 1100–1500) periods. The English modals have played an important role in both synchronic and diachronic linguistic work in the last decades, but a number of contested issues concerning their development remain unresolved. This dissertation attempts to answer some of the open questions through careful analysis of the extant Old and Middle English sources and comparison with other Germanic languages, such as Old Norse, Middle Danish, and Middle Dutch. The first part of the book provides a theoretical and methodological introduction to the study of the early English modals, the semantics of modality, and the historical corpora and other textual sources used for the investigation. The second part presents the investigation itself, which consists of four interconnected studies on the development of the modals, focussing on various morphological and syntactic developments in Middle English, the numerous changes to the ‘marginal’ modal DARE, and the semantic development of the ‘core’ modals CAN, MAY, and MUST. I pay particular attention to a number of changes which do not follow the predictions made in the grammaticalization literature, but which can be readily explained with reference to analogy.
@phdthesis{gregersen2020dissertation, title = {Early English modals: Form, function, and analogy}, author = {Gregersen, Sune}, series = {LOT Dissertation Series}, number = {579}, year = {2020}, institution = {University of Amsterdam}, address = {Amsterdam} }

2019

Wat mutt, dat mutt: ‘Independent’ modals in West Germanic vernaculars

Wim Caers, and Sune Gregersen

Nederlandse Taalkunde, 2019

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The squib investigates the dialectal distribution of the Dutch construction type HET kan/mag/moet, lit. ‘it can/may/must’, where a modal verb occurs ‘independently’ with an eventive subject and no infinitival complement. The construction is shown to be widely attested not only in traditional dialects of Dutch, but also in Frisian, Low German, and Afrikaans. We suggest that the construction, which does not occur in standard German or English, is an areal feature shared by the West Germanic vernaculars of northwestern Germany and the Low Countries, including the South African ‘side branch’ Afrikaans.
@article{caers&gregersen2019modals, title = {Wat mutt, dat mutt: ‘Independent’ modals in West Germanic vernaculars}, author = {Caers, Wim and Gregersen, Sune}, journal = {Nederlandse Taalkunde}, volume = {24}, numer = {3}, pages = {399--417}, year = {2019}, doi = {10.5117/NEDTAA2019.3.005.CAER} }

2018

Some (critical) questions for diachronic construction grammar

Sune Gregersen

Folia Linguistica Historica, 2018

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The paper critically reviews a recent volume on Diachronic Construction Grammar. It is argued that a more convincing case for the diachronic construction grammar approach could have been made by more explicitly comparing it to other approaches to historical linguistics, and that a number of central notions, such as “constructionalization”, are not applied consistently throughout the volume. In addition, an analysis of the constructionalization of English BE going to presented in the volume is examined and shown not to be supported by the Early Modern English data.
@article{gregersen2018dcxg, title = {Some (critical) questions for diachronic construction grammar}, author = {Gregersen, Sune}, journal = {Folia Linguistica Historica}, volume = {39}, number = {2}, pages = {341--360}, year = {2018}, doi = {10.1515/flih-2018-0012} }