Ongoing work on grammatical change and variation in 19th-century Danish
In 2020–2021 I worked as a research assistant at the Department of Nordic Studies and Linguistics (NorS) at the University of Copenhagen. Having access to the linguistic resources of the department, such as the collection of the Centre for Dialectology, inspired me to a number of investigations of earlier Danish, in particular variation and change in the 19th century. Since 2021 I have also been an external member of the research group Grammatik i 1800-tallet [Grammar in the 19th century] at the Danish Language Council.
The 19th century is an exciting period in the history of Danish. The number and quality of our linguistic sources increase dramatically in this period, which also saw the establishment of linguistics as an independent academic discipline. At the same time a number of societal changes – such as increased urbanization and the introduction of compulsory schooling in 1814 – led to a process of standardization and dialect levelling which progressed even further in the 20th century.
In my research on 19th-century Danish I have been particularly interested in what the sources can tell us about sociolinguistic and dialectal variation. Among other things I have investigated a now obsolete proximative construction (e.g. færdig at græde ‘about to cry’) and the sociolinguistic variation between two passive constructions, the so-called s-passive and blive-passive.
Presentations
Title
Event
Date
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From possibility to preference: The history of Danish gide ‘be able to, feel like’
The article discusses an overlooked phraseological parallel between Danish, Low German, and Frisian dialects, namely the expression gide være(t) over ‘feel like’ (Low German öwer (wesen/sien) mögen, Insular North Frisian auer wees mei). I argue that the expression is a structural loan from Low German into Danish and North Frisian and that such idiomatic expressions have a great potential for the study of historical language contact.
@article{gregersen2024kontakt,title={Gide være(t) over og dansk-nedertysk-frisisk sprogkontakt [Gide være(t) over ‘feel like’ and Danish–Low German–Frisian language contact]},author={Gregersen, Sune},journal={Danske Talesprog},volume={24},pages={1--14},year={2024}}
Et mærkeligt modalverbum: om gide fra middelalderen til moderne dansk [A mysterious modal verb: on gide ‘feel like’ from the Middle Ages to Modern Danish]
Sune Gregersen
In Mange grublende Dage ere gaaede forud: Grammatik i 1800-tallet som nøgle til moderne normproblemer, 2024
This paper traces the history of the Danish “marginal” modal gide ‘feel like’ from the Middle Ages to the present day. While gide has developed syntactically in the direction of the modal verbs, its semantic development has rather been away from prototypical modality: in Middle Danish gide expressed possibility (‘be able to’), whereas in Present-Day Danish it expresses an inclination of the subject referent (‘feel like, bother to’). I suggest that this semantic shift happened in contexts where a possibility was contingent on the current disposition of the subject referent, such as their stamina or appetite. I also argue (pace van der Auwera et al. 2009) that Middle Danish gide was not limited to so-called participant-internal possibility contexts.
@incollection{gregersen2024gide,title={Et mærkeligt modalverbum: om gide fra middelalderen til moderne dansk [A mysterious modal verb: on gide ‘feel like’ from the Middle Ages to Modern Danish]},author={Gregersen, Sune},booktitle={Mange grublende Dage ere gaaede forud: Grammatik i 1800-tallet som nøgle til moderne normproblemer},editor={Jensen, Eva Skafte and Schack, Jørgen},series={Dansk Sprognævns skrifter},number={59},pages={101--120},year={2024},publisher={Dansk Sprognævn},address={Bogense}}
2023
Restrictions on past-tense passives in Late Modern Danish
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}}
2021
Proksimativt færdig ’lige ved’ i ømål og bornholmsk [Proximative færdig ‘about to’ in Insular and Bornholm Danish]
The article investigates the use of færdig (‘done, ready’) in the sense ‘about to’ in traditional Insular and Bornholm Danish, as in ieg var færdi at qvæles ‘I was about to choke’ (Ole Kollerød). I describe this as a so-called proximative aspectual construction and investigate its syntactic and semantic properties in a small text corpus. It is shown that proximative færdig was different in the Insular and Bornholm dialects with respect to semantics, morphology, and choice of preposition. I also briefly discuss the distribution of the construction in older written Danish (until the 19th century) and in other Scandinavian varieties.
@article{gregersen2021proksimativ,title={Proksimativt færdig 'lige ved' i ømål og bornholmsk [Proximative færdig `about to' in Insular and Bornholm Danish]},author={Gregersen, Sune},journal={Danske Talesprog},volume={21},pages={131--152},year={2021}}
2020
Review of Ebba Hjorth et al., Dansk Sproghistorie 3: Bøjning og bygning (2019)
@article{gregersen2020review-ds3,title={Review of Ebba Hjorth et al., Dansk Sproghistorie 3: Bøjning og bygning (2019)},author={Gregersen, Sune},journal={RASK},volume={52},pages={63--73},year={2020}}
