Grammatikalisering af type-konstruktioner og pseudo-partitiver i dansk

Resumé

The aim of this paper is to argue that Danish type-noun binominals (en slags cykel ‘a kind of bike’) and pseudo-partitive binominals (et stykke ost ‘a piece of cheese’) with the formal structure [N1 + N2] have followed analogical patterns of grammaticalization both structurally and functionally. On the basis of a study of 2946 tokens of slags ‘kind’ in the construction EN/ET-slags-S(noun), retrieved from KorpusDK, we discuss agreement features and polysemy in relation to the fact that slags occurs more frequently as a modifier marking ‘association’ than with its original taxonomic meaning. Against this background, we suggest that ultimately N2 is winning the competition for discourse prominence over slags, which, thus, is in the process of converting from a lexical to a grammatical element.