Adverbials in Extra-left position in spoken Danish
-
Jan Heegård Petersen
Abstract
The article describes the distribution of fronted adverbial constituents in Danish in the Prefield and the Extra-left (‘left dislocation’) positions: i morgen skal vi i skole versus i morgen der skal vi i skole ‘tomorrow we go to school’. The data, 635 sentences with a fronted adverbial, are extracted from seven sociolinguistic interviews. The article shows that some types of adverbials are more liable to occur in the Extra-left position than others. Conditional clauses and når-clauses (‘when’) occur almost always in the Extra-left position. Attitude and manner adverbials like heldigvis ‘luckily’ and traditionelt ‘traditionally’ occur infrequently in Extra-left position. Contrary to what has been suggested in the literature, a principle of lexical weight does not have much explanatory power. Instead, grammatical principles and principles related to informational backgrounding provide explanations for the distribution.
Acknowledgments
I am grateful to Elisabeth Engberg-Pedersen, Karoline Kühl, two anonymous reviewers for comments on earlier versions of this article and to the audience at the SLE 2023 workshop on Left and right peripheries in discourse: Theoretical and empirical perspectives across languages and the audience at the Dansk funktionel grammatik meeting in April 2024 for comments on the work presented in this article.
References
Becker-Christensen, Christian. 2010. Dansk syntaks – indføring i dansk sætningsgrammatik og sætningsanalyse [Danish syntax – introduction to Danish sentence grammar]. Frederiksberg: Samfundslitteratur.Suche in Google Scholar
Brøcker, Karen Kiel. 2014. Tunge led i forfelt og ekstraposition – et fænomen i dansk talesprogsgrammatik [Heavy constituents in the prefield and in the extra-left position – a phenomenon in the grammar of spoken Danish] Skrifter om Samtalegrammatik 1(2). Available at: https://samtalegrammatik.au.dk/fileadmin/samtalegrammatik/sos/1/Broecker_2014_Tunge_led_i_forfelt_og_ekstraposition.pdf.Suche in Google Scholar
Brøcker, Karen Kiel, Magnus G. T. Hamann, Mathias Jørgensen, Simon Biering Lange, Nicolas H. Mikkelsen & Jakob Steensig. 2012. Samtalesprogets grammatik. Fire fænomener og nogle metodiske overvejelser [The grammar of conversational language. Four phenomena and some methodological considerations]. NyS, Nydanske Sprogstudier 42. 10–40. https://doi.org/10.7146/nys.v42i42.13672.Suche in Google Scholar
Christensen, Sune Just. 2017. Om så og der som genoptagere for ekstraponerede tid- og stedsadverbialer [On så and der as resumptives for extra-posed time and place adverbials]. Ny forskning i grammatik 24. 107–120.Suche in Google Scholar
de Clercq, Karen & Liliane Haegeman. 2023. A generalized resumptive in the Ghent variety of East Flemish? In Karen De Clercq, Liliane Haegeman, Terje Lohndal & Christine Meklenborg (eds.), Adverbial resumption in verb second languages, 113–144. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Suche in Google Scholar
de Clercq, Karen, Liliane Haegeman, Terje Lohndal & Christine Meklenborg (eds.). 2023. Adverbial resumption in verb second languages. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Suche in Google Scholar
Diderichsen, Paul. 1957. Elementær dansk grammatik [Elementary Danish grammar], 2nd edn. København: Gyldendals Forlagstrykkeri.Suche in Google Scholar
Eide, Kristin Melum. 2011. Norwegian (non-V2) declaratives, resumptive elements, and the Wackernagel position. Nordic Journal of Linguistics 34(2). 179–213. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0332586511000163.Suche in Google Scholar
Ekerot, Lars-Johan. 1988. Så-konstruktionen i svenskan. Konstruktionstypen “Om vädret tillater, så genomföras övningen” i funktionellt grammatisk perspektiv [The så-construction in Swedish. The construction type “om vädret tillater, så genomföras övningen” in a functional-grammatical perspective]. Lund: University of Lund.Suche in Google Scholar
Ekerot, Lars-Johan. 1992. The Swedish så-construction in a functional and contrastive perspective. In Jonna Luis-Jensen & Jóhan Hendrik Winther Poulsen (eds.), The Nordic Languages and modern linguistics 7, vol. 1, 191–203. Tórshavn: Føroya Fróðskaparfelag.Suche in Google Scholar
Elmquist, Axel Louis. 1945. The resumptive use of så in Swedish. Scandinavian Studies 18(6). 209–232.Suche in Google Scholar
Greco, Ciro & Liliane Haegemann. 2023. Frame setters and microvariation of subject-initial verb second. In Karen De Clercq, Liliane Haegeman, Terje Lohndal & Christine Meklenborg (eds.), Adverbial resumption in verb second languages, 43–77. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Suche in Google Scholar
Gregersen, Frans, Marie Maegaard & Nicolai Pharao. 2014. The LANCHART corpus. In Jacques Durand, Ulrike Gut & Gjert Kristoffersen (eds.), The Oxford handbook of corpus phonology, 534–545. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Suche in Google Scholar
Hamann, Magnus G. T., Simon Biering Lange & Karen Kiel Brøcker. 2011. Tunge led i forfeltet og ekstraposition – et fænomen i dansk talesprogsgrammatik [Heavy constituents in the prefield and in extra-position – a phenomenon in the grammar of spoken Danish]. In Inger Schonderbeek Hansen & Peter Widell (eds.), 13. Møde om Udforskningen af Dansk Sprog: Aarhus Universitet 14. – 15. oktober 2010, 171–177. Aarhus: Nordisk Institut, Aarhus Universitet.Suche in Google Scholar
Hansen, Erik & Lars Heltoft. 2011. Grammatik over det danske sprog [Grammar of the Danish language], vol. III. København & Odense: Det Danske Sprog- og Litteraturselskab & Syddansk Universitetsforlag.Suche in Google Scholar
Heegård Petersen, Jan. 2023. En kvantitativ-distributionel syntaktisk analyse af ekstraposition til venstre [A quantitative-distributional syntactic analysis of extra-left position]. Ny forskning i grammatik 30. 201–218. https://doi.org/10.7146/nfg.v1i30.137961.Suche in Google Scholar
Heegård Petersen, Jan. Accepted. Det emneskiftende smask og andre diskursgrammatiske træk ved DR TV’s Vores Vejr [The topic-shifting smack and other discourse grammatical features in DR TV’s Our Weather]. In Inger Schonderbeek Hansen & Tina Thode Hougaard (eds.), 20. Møde om Udforskningen af Dansk Sprog: Aarhus Universitet, 10. – 11. oktober 2024. Århus: Nordisk, Institut for Kommunikation og kultur, Aarhus Universitet.Suche in Google Scholar
Heegård Petersen, Jan & Jacob Thøgersen. Accepted. Solskin fra Vestegnen flytter sig gradvist vestover. Genre, register og mundtlighed i vejrudsigten. [Sunshine from the Western parts of Copenhagen is gradually moving towards the west. Genre, register and orality in the weather report].Suche in Google Scholar
Holmberg, Anders. 2020. On the bottleneck hypothesis of Verb Second in Swedish. In Sam Wolfe & Rebecca Woods (eds.), Rethinking verb second, 40–60. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Suche in Google Scholar
Holmberg, Anders. 2023. The syntax of the V3 particle så in the Swedish left periphery In Karen De Clercq. In Liliane Haegeman, Terje Lohndal & Christine Meklenborg (eds.), Adverbial resumption in verb second languages, 287–311. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Suche in Google Scholar
Jørgensen, Henrik. 2013. Sætningsspidsens udfyldning – observationer fra et talesprogsmateriale [The filling of the sentence head – observations from a spoken language material]. Ny forskning i grammatik 20. 183–202. https://doi.org/10.7146/nfg.v21i20.23612.Suche in Google Scholar
Jørgensen, Henrik. 2014. Brugen af fundamentfeltet hos flersprogede børn i Århus Vest [The use of the prefield among multilingual children in West Århus]. In Inger Schonderbeek Hansen, Tina Thode Hougaard & Peter Widell (eds.), 14. Møde om Udforskningen af Dansk Sprog, 187–200. Århus: Institut for Æstetik og Kommunikation, Aarhus Universitet.Suche in Google Scholar
Jørgensen, Henrik. 2016. Doubling left syntactic positions in Danish. In Sten Vikner, Henrik Jørgensen & Elly van Gelderen (eds.), Let us have articles betwixt us: Papers in historical and comparative linguistics in honour of Johanna L. Wood, 281–298. Århus: Dept. of English, School of Communication and Culture, Aarhus University.Suche in Google Scholar
Larsson, Ida & Kari Kinn. 2022. Stability and change in the C-domain in American Swedish. Languages 7. 256. https://doi.org/10.3390/languages7040256.Suche in Google Scholar
Meklenborg, Christine & Terje Lohndal. 2023. Adverbial resumption and scope: A case study of Norwegian. In Karen de Clercq, Liliane Haegeman, Terje Lohndal & Christine Meklenborg (eds.), Adverbial resumption in verb second languages, 221–241. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Suche in Google Scholar
Mikkelsen, Kristian. 1911. Dansk Ordföjningslære [Danish syntax]. København: Lehmann & Stages Forlag.Suche in Google Scholar
Nordström, Jackie. 2010. The Swedish så-construction, a new point of departure. Working Papers in Scandinavian Syntax 85. 37–63.Suche in Google Scholar
Salvesen, Christine Meklenborg. 2020. Adverbial resumptive particles and verb second. In Sam Wolfe & Rebecca Woods (eds.), Rethinking verb second, 90–125. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Suche in Google Scholar
Sandberg, Martin. 2003. Gränsmarkörerna så, då och Ø i gymnastisters tal- och skriftspråk. Kvantitativa och funktionella aspekter på adjunktionella så/platshållar-så [The boundary markers så, då and Ø in high school students’ spoken and written language. Quantitative and functional aspects of adjunctional-så/placeholder-så] (Meddelanden från Institutionen för svenska språket vid Göteborgs universitet 46). Göteborg: Institutionen för svenska språket, Göteborgs universitet.Suche in Google Scholar
Sollid, Hilde & Kristin M. Eide. 2007. On verb second and the så-construction in two Mainland Scandinavian contact situations. In Merete Anderssen & Marit R. Westergaard (eds.), Nordlyd (Papers from the Language Acquisition Workshop, SCL 2006), vol. 34(3), 7–28. Trondheim: University of Stavanger and NTNU. CASTL, Tromsø. Available at: http://www.ub.uit.no/baser/nordlyd.Suche in Google Scholar
Thim-Mabrey, Christiane. 1987. Adverbiale+so. Distribution und Funktion des Korrelats so im Frühneuhochdeutschen. Sprachwissenschaft 12. 180–219.Suche in Google Scholar
Westbury, Josh. 2016. Left dislocation: A typological overview. Stellenbosch Papers in Linguistics Plus 50. 21–45. https://doi.org/10.5842/50-0-715.Suche in Google Scholar
© 2025 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Editorial
- Left and right peripheries in discourse: an introduction
- Articles
- Between core and periphery: the development in English of a modal adverb, an evaluative adverb and a discourse connector
- The emergence of last I checked fragments: a story of shifting allegiance
- Left-peripheral bottom line sequences
- Peripheral versus non-peripheral optative particles
- Adverbials in Extra-left position in spoken Danish
- Right-peripheral subjects in German and Persian across registers
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Editorial
- Left and right peripheries in discourse: an introduction
- Articles
- Between core and periphery: the development in English of a modal adverb, an evaluative adverb and a discourse connector
- The emergence of last I checked fragments: a story of shifting allegiance
- Left-peripheral bottom line sequences
- Peripheral versus non-peripheral optative particles
- Adverbials in Extra-left position in spoken Danish
- Right-peripheral subjects in German and Persian across registers
