MA thesis on the syntax and semantics of causal clauses in Modern Danish
My master’s thesis (University of Copenhagen, 2014) was a study of the form and function of fordi ‘because’ clauses in modern spoken Danish, more specifially the word order of such clauses and their semantic relation to their matrix clause. The corpus consisted of recorded speeches from the Danish Parliament. This represents a register not usually included in investigations of spoken language, which tend to focus on more informal and colloquial speech styles.
The results suggested that fordi ‘because’ clauses in modern Danish differ in a number of ways from how they have traditionally been described, even in a formal register like parliamentary speeches. For instance, they more frequently have verb-second (V2) than verb-third (V3) word order, a feature often described as colloquial, and they were found to introduce interrogative clauses, suggesting that fordi is not always a subordinating conjunction.
A revised version of my master’s thesis was published in 2019 in NyS [Journal of Modern Danish]. I have later returned to the topic of causal clauses in my work on Wangerooge Frisian.
Presentation
Title
Event
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Refusing to subordinate? The syntax of Danish causal clauses
Young Linguists’ International Conference, Stockholm
This article investigates the form and function of fordi ‘because’ clauses in formal spoken Danish. The corpus consists of the minutes and video recordings of five debates in the Danish Parliament. It is shown that verb-second (V2) order is much more frequent than verb-third (V3) – indicating that V2 is not only a feature of colloquial spoken language – and that fordi can introduce interrogative clauses (as in fordi hvad handler det om i skrøbelige stater? ‘because what is it all about in vulnerable states?’). In addition, it is discussed to what extent the choice between V2 and V3 is predicted by the meaning of the fordi ‘because’ clause.
@article{gregersen2019fordi,title={\AA{}rsagssætninger med fordi i (formelt) dansk talesprog [Causal clauses with fordi ‘because’ in (formal) spoken Danish]},author={Gregersen, Sune},journal={NyS: Nydanske Sprogstudier},volume={57},pages={80--111},year={2019},doi={10.7146/nys.v1i57.117119}}
2014
Fire former for kausalitet: En empirisk undersøgelse af fordi-sætninger i dansk talesprog [Four types of causality: An empirical study of fordi-clauses in spoken Danish]
This thesis is an empirical study of causal clauses headed by the conjunction fordi ‘because’ in spoken Danish. Such clauses may have either of two word order patterns, here termed verb-second (V2) and verb-third (V3), and they may serve a number of different semantic functions. The study examines the frequency of these word order patterns in fordi clauses in Danish and the possibility of a correspondence between the word order of the fordi clause and its semantic relation to the matrix clause. The data are five transcripts of debates in the national parliament of Denmark. After a brief introduction to the subject matter, I move on to discuss a number of theories about causal clauses, in particular the ones put forward by Sweetser (1990) and Hengeveld (1996), and conclude that it is possible to distinguish between four different semantic types: physical, intentional, epistemic, and illocutionary causal clauses. I then discuss four studies of Danish causal clauses, which differ as to what is regarded the deciding factor of the two word order patterns. In the following section, I describe my method and discuss some problems regarding the unambiguous identification of the semantic types in a pilot study consisting of one transcript from the parliament. I then go through my main study. The main findings of the study are: The V2 pattern is more frequent in fordi-clauses than the V3 pattern. Fordi clauses occur much more frequently with non-presupposed matrix clauses than with presupposed ones. There is no one-to-one correspondence between the word order of the fordi clause on the one hand and the semantic type of the fordi clause on the other; the same applies to whether the matrix clause contains presupposed information or not. The conjunction fordi can introduce interrogative clauses. I then argue that fordi is a highly polyfunctional conjunction as it may occur with either V2 or V3, with either presupposed and non-presupposed matrix clauses, with all four of the semantic types, and with a following interrogative clause. The last point I take as an indication that fordi is not always a subordinating conjunction, but can be a coordinator as well. Finally, I discuss the relation between causality and relevance and argue that this may serve as an explanation for some of the problems connected to the identification of the semantic type of the causal clauses.
@mathesis{gregersen2014speciale,title={Fire former for kausalitet: En empirisk undersøgelse af fordi-sætninger i dansk talesprog [Four types of causality: An empirical study of fordi-clauses in spoken Danish]},author={Gregersen, Sune},year={2014},doi={10.5281/zenodo.8351636},institution={University of Copenhagen},address={Copenhagen}}
