The Grammar of Giants
Late-stage debonding of kæmpe ‘giant’ in Danish
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.7146/sss.v11i2.123476Keywords:
degrammaticalization, language change, morphology, corpus linguistics, DanishAbstract
It is a common process of language change for free morphemes to become bound morphemes, but the inverse process (termed ‘debonding’ by Norde 2009) is much rarer. Previous studies have found that lexemes with the original meaning ‘giant’ (German Riesen, Dutch reuze) have historically grammaticalized as prefixes, and subsequently debonded into free morphemes with the same bleached meaning as the prefixes (Van Goethem & Hiligsmann 2014; Norde & Van Goethem 2014). Using a synchronic corpus of written Danish (KorpusDK), this paper shows that the Danish word kæmpe, originally ‘giant’, is in the late stages of a similar process of debonding. By investigating the morphological and syntactic patterning of kæmpe, the paper shows that kæmpe has indeed debonded, and occurs as a free-standing semantically bleached adjective, but that it does not yet exhibit fully prototypical adjectival behavior. All three functions of kæmpe remain in use: a noun with the specific meaning ‘giant’, a semantically bleached prefix, and a corresponding semantically bleached adjective. This would argue against an account relying on abrupt category change, and it is proposed that kæmpe has reached its current status through gradual analogy-driven change.
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Velupillai, Viveka. 2012. An introduction to linguistic typology. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins. doi:10.1075/z.176.
Wagner, Johannes & Brian MacWhinney. 2010. Sam4 corpus. Talkbank. doi:10.21415/ T5FK5V.
Walmsness, Roar. 2002. Særskrivning av sammensatte ord. Språknytt 3(4), 26–29.
Basbøll, Hans. 2005. The phonology of Danish (The Phonology of the World’s Languages). Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press.
Battefeld, Malte, Torsten Leuschner & Gudrun Rawoens. 2018. Evaluative morphology in German, Dutch and Swedish. Constructional networks and the loci of change. In Kristel Van Goethem, Muriel Norde, Evie Coussé & Gudrun Vanderbouwhede (eds.), Category change from a constructional perspective (Constructional Approaches to Language 20), 229–262. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins. doi:10.1075/cal.20.
Bhat, D.N. Shankara. 1994. The adjectival category. Criteria for differentiation and identification (Studies in Language Companion Series 24). Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins. doi:10.1075/slcs.24.
Bhat, D.N. Shankara & Regina Pustet. 2000. Adjective. In Geert E. Booij, Christian Lehmann, Joachim Mugdan, Stavros Skopeteas & Wolfgang Kesselheim (eds.), Morphology. An international handbook on inflection and word-formation (Handbooks of Linguistics and Communication Science 17), vol. 1, 757–769. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. doi:10.1515/9783110111286.1.10.757.
Booij, Geert E. 2009. Compounding and construction morphology. In Rochelle Lieber & Pavol Štekauer (eds.), The Oxford handbook of compounding (Oxford Handbooks Online), 201–216. Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199695720.013.0010.
De Smet, Hendrik. 2014. The course of actualization. Language 88(3), 601–633. doi:10.1353/lan.2012.0056.
DSL = Det Danske Sprog- og Litteraturselskab. 1918–1956. Ordbog over det danske sprog. Available online, URL:ordnet.dk/ods.
DSL = Det Danske Sprog- og Litteraturselskab. 2008. KorpusDK. URL:ordnet.dk/ korpusdk.
DSL = Det Danske Sprog- og Litteraturselskab. 2018. Den danske ordbog. URL:ordnet. dk/ddo.
DSN = Dansk Sprognævn. 2014. Retskrivningsregler. URL:dsn.dk/retskrivning/ retskrivningsregler.
Faarlund, Jan Terje. 2007. Parameterization and change in non-finite complementation. Diachronica 24(1), 57–80. doi:10.1075/dia.24.1.04faa.
Fischer, Olga. 2007. Morphosyntactic change. Functional and formal perspectives (Oxford Surveys in Syntax and Morphology). Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press.
Hallencreutz, Katharina. 2001. Skyll på längden, inte på engelskan. Språkvård 4, 4–9. Hansen, Erik & Lars Heltoft. 2011. Grammatik over det danske sprog. Odense:
Syddansk Universitetsforlag.
Haspelmath, Martin. 1999. Why is grammaticalization irreversible? Linguistics 37(6), 1043–1068. doi:10.1515/ling.37.6.1043.
Hoeksema, Jack. 2012. Elative compounds in Dutch. Properties and developments.
In Guido Oebel (ed.), Crosslinguistic comparison of intensified adjectives and adverbs (Schriften Zur Vergleichenden Sprachwissenschaft), 97–142. Hamburg: Dr Kovac.
Hopper, Paul J. & Elizabeth Closs Traugott. 2003. Grammaticalization (Cambridge Textbooks in Linguistics). 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9781139165525.
JASP Team. 2016. JASP. A fresh way to do statistics. Open source statistical software, URL:jasp-stats.org.
MacWhinney, Brian & Johannes Wagner. 2010. Transcribing, searching and data sharing. The CLAN software and the TalkBank data repository. Gesprächsforschung 11, 154–173.
Moravcsik, Edith M. 1978. Reduplication constructions. In Joseph H. Greenberg (ed.), Universals in human language, 297–334. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Norde, Muriel. 2009. Degrammaticalization. Oxford & New York: Oxford University
Press. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199207923.001.0001.
Norde, Muriel & Kristel Van Goethem. 2014. Bleaching, productivity and debonding of prefixoids. A corpus-based analysis of ‘giant’ in German and Swedish. Linguisticæ Investigationes 37(2), 256–274. doi:10.1075/li.37.2.05nor.
Norde, Muriel. 2020. Dänish kæmpe. Gebunden und frei. Paper presented at Sprachwissenschaftliches Kolloquium, Humboldt University of Berlin.
Puggaard, Rasmus. 2020. Tagged KorpusDK concordance for kæmpe ‘giant’. DataverseNL, version 1. doi:10.34894/YXXNK3. 20
Traugott, Elizabeth Closs & Graeme Trousdale. 2013. Constructionalization and constructional change (Oxford Studies in Diachronic & Historical Linguistics 6). Oxford:OxfordUniversityPress.doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199679898.001.0001.
Van Goethem, Kristel & Hendrik De Smet. 2014. How nouns turn into adjectives. The emergence of new adjectives in French, English and Dutch through debonding processes. Languages in Contrast 14(2), 251–277. doi:10.1075/lic.14.2.04goe.
Van Goethem, Kristel & Philippe Hiligsmann. 2014. When two paths converge. Debonding and clipping of Dutch reuze. Journal of Germanic Linguistics 26(1), 31–64. doi:10.1017/S1470542713000172.
Van Goethem, Kristel & Matthias Hüning. 2015. From noun to evaluative adjective. Conversion or debonding? Dutch top and its equivalents in German. Journal of Germanic Linguistics 27(4), 366–409. doi:10.1017/S1470542715000112.
Velupillai, Viveka. 2012. An introduction to linguistic typology. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins. doi:10.1075/z.176.
Wagner, Johannes & Brian MacWhinney. 2010. Sam4 corpus. Talkbank. doi:10.21415/ T5FK5V.
Walmsness, Roar. 2002. Særskrivning av sammensatte ord. Språknytt 3(4), 26–29.
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Published
2020-12-15
How to Cite
Puggaard, R. (2020). The Grammar of Giants: Late-stage debonding of kæmpe ‘giant’ in Danish. Scandinavian Studies in Language, 11(2), 21. https://doi.org/10.7146/sss.v11i2.123476
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