Modern Danish Research Articles

How to Live in order to Die to Salvation? the Judgement Scene and Early Modern Danish Funeral Sermons

Abstract How to be counted among the saved on Doomsday? This article presents the emergence of Danish funeral works in the sixteenth century through a case study of Niels Hemmingsen’s sermon for Herluff Trolle (1565). It discusses in particular the theological function of the charitable deeds in the funeral biography for Trolle, and argues that the preacher’s motivation for presenting these deeds was more than the dynastic interests of the noble families. The frame of the emergence of the genre, as well as the particular emphasis on charitable deeds, is the expectation of Judgement Day.

Rzeczowniki homograficzne w języku duńskim − analiza morfologiczna i semantyczna

The article is a study of nouns with the same spelling but different grammatical gender (graphic homonymy, i.e. homography) in Modern Danish. The aim of the article is to analyze the grammatical and lexical homography of both neuter and non-neuter Danish nouns, which have been divided into two groups. The nouns in the first group occur in both grammatical genders with no difference in meaning (grammatical homographs), while the second group is comprised of nouns that do have different meanings based on their grammatical gender (lexical homographs). The author has also identified differences based on word stress (stress homography), different pronunciation and differences connected with the presence of stød or lack thereof, which usually cause a difference in meaning.

“It is me” – the replacement of the nominative by the oblique form in Danish subject complements

In this paper, it is suggested that the replacement of the nominative by the oblique form in Danish subject complements happened as a part of major structural changes taking place in Middle Danish. The major structural changes in question involve the shift from a case-rich to a case-poor language in Early Middle Danish/Late Middle Danish, and the changing of the status of the subject of the sentence in Late Middle Danish/Early Modern Danish. As one outcome, the distribution of the case forms of personal pronouns changed from being primarily following the traditional syntactic-semantic principle of conveying semantic roles and syntactic functions to following principles pertaining to information structure with notions like theme and rheme, prominence and focus/anti-focus. The approach is functional-structural.

Kjeld Abell’s Den blå pekingeser: Introduction and Translation

ABSTRACT: This is the first English translation of Kjeld Abell’s Den blå pekingeser [The Blue Pekinese], which was first published and performed in 1954. The introduction is a reprint of an entry on Kjeld Abell by the translator, originally published in volume 214 of the Dictionary of Literary Biography (1999). The play is in two parts, indicated by the fall of the curtain at the end of act 1. Although there are eleven characters, almost the entire play takes place in the mind of André, who enters the Café Bern at the beginning and leaves it with his wife Marianne before the final curtain. With its virtuosic use of theatre space and a unique soundscape, Den blå pekingeser remains a classic of modern Danish drama.

Chancen und Perspektiven eines neuen Wörterbuchtyps: Das zweisprachige Lernerwörterbuch für Fachsprachen

The purpose of the present paper is twofold: on the one hand it aims to outline a new type of dictionaries, the LSP dictionary for learners, and distinguish it from other dictionary types; on the other hand the study presents the multifunctional information structure of this type of dictionary through the example of two dictionaries.First the paper examines some formerly suggested names of the new type of dictionary in three languages (Hungarian/German/English). Then the author proposes a new name (chapter 2.1.), this is followed (chapter 2.2.) by the analysis of the more specific literature on the requirements against multifunctional and user-friendly LSP dictionaries for learners (see Fuertes-Olivera (2005), Tarp (2005), and Fata (2009a)). Finally the author distinguishes this type of dictionaries from other dictionary types and gives a definition (chapter 2.3.). Since the study is based on the findings of the modern Danish functional lexicographic theory, the paper applies its concepts: in the final section of the theoretical part of the paper the author describes the possible types of users of LSP dictionaries for learners, the potential types of user situations (chapter 2.4.) and the potencial dictionary functions (chapter 2.5.).In the practical part of the study the author presents the macro-, micro- and hyperstructures chosen in relation to the given special subject field and LSP in order to make working with learners’ dictionaries easy and enjoyable for the primary target group of the dictionaries: for those who study LSP in a foreign language.

The regrammation of paradigms: the development of auxiliaries in Danish

This article surveys the development of voice and tense auxiliaries in Scandinavian with a focus on Danish. Voice is the first category (documented indirectly by Gothic) to show periphrastic forms in paradigmatic cooperation with inflectional forms; and these periphrastic forms are modelled on predicative constructions. Modern Danish has introduced verbal constructions at the expense of all predicative morphology, and the Old Scandinavian auxiliary verbs hafa/hava ‘have’ and vera/wæra ‘be’, verða/wartha ‘become’ have undergone semantic changes, including specialisation and markedness shift. This regrammation process involves semantic changes that must be described in terms of paradigm (re)organisation and cannot be captured in terms of changes along the parameters of the cline of grammaticalisation. Two main types of auxiliaries are distinguished: inflectional auxiliaries, with predication scope (tense, mood and voice) as part of otherwise inflectional paradigms, and, constructional auxiliaries (copula verbs) with predicate scope. Modern Danish inflectional auxiliaries express perfect tense and active voice with transitive verbs (have ‘have’), perfect tense, active voice and telicity with intransitive verbs (være ‘be’ and have ‘have’), stativity (copula verbs være ‘be’ and blive ‘become, turn’) and passive voice and telicity in the periphrastic passive (være ‘be’ and blive ‘become, be’). Their meaning potentials differ according to the paradigms they are part of.

Don’t Rush to Rehabilitate: A Remark on Koeneman and Zeijlstra 2014

Koeneman and Zeijlstra (2014) aim to rehabilitate the strong version of the Rich Agreement Hypothesis (RAH), according to which there is a bidirectional implication between “rich” agreement morphology in the verbal system and movement of the finite verb to a functional head above vP but below the C system (V-to-I movement). We show that one of the clearest empirical arguments raised in the literature against the strong RAH—the persistence of V-to-I movement in Early Modern Danish—is not addressed by any of the counterarguments raised by Koeneman and Zeijlstra and therefore still stands as evidence against the rehabilitated generalization and theory.

Pragmatikkens rolle i et morfologisk funderet genussystem i yngre middelskånsk

In Old Danish (c800-c1525), masculine, feminine, and neuter nouns were used to denote humans, animals, things, and abstract categories. In Early Modern Danish (c1525-c1700), however, the masculine and the feminine merged into a common gender, confining the anaphoric and cataphoric personal pronouns han ‘he’ and hun ‘she’ to nouns denoting humans. This paper points out an early pragmatically based use of gender in the Scanian text Sjælens Trøst ‘Comfort of the Soul’ in manuscripts C 529 and A 109 from c1425. From a Christian point of view, the noun afgudh ‘idol’ is used as a neuter and thereby objectified, unlike the masculine noun gudh ‘God’. This use of the neuter is in all likelihood one of the first steps on the way from a primarily morphologically based three-gender system to a primarily semantically based two-gender system which distinguishes between human and non-human nouns.

What do(es) you mean? the pragmatics of generic second person pronouns in modern spoken Danish

In modern Danish, the most frequently used pronoun for generic reference is man, developed from the noun man(d) ‘man’. Recently, though, the second person singular pronoun du has gained ground, in parallel to similar recent developments in other languages. A large-scale, longitudinal study of the LANCHART corpus of spoken Danish has documented a rise in the use of generic du in Copenhagen (and later in the rest of Denmark) during the period from the early 1970s, where generic du was practically non-existent, till the late 1980s where du comprised around 25% of all pronouns with generic meaning. However, recordings from the 2000s show that the use of du has peaked and is now decreasing or stabilizing at a lower level.This article focuses on intra-individual and intra-conversational variation within the LANCHART corpus with the aim of uncovering the pragmatic effect of using du instead of other generic pronouns. All passages in the recordings have been coded according to macro speech act, activity type, type of interaction and genre as well as enunciation. The results of a statistical analysis using mixed models show a number of correlations as to the use of generic du (in comparison with man), and by and large support the claim that generic du is used as a resource for construing involvement, arguably by exploiting the ambiguity of du between a generic and a specific second person meaning. These quantitative results make up the point of departure for corroborating qualitative analyses of the discourse framing of the use of generic pronouns.

Food Policing in Early Modern Danish Towns

This article explores the efforts of early modern authorities to provide food security in three different Danish towns in order to understand the goals and methods of early modern food policing. As in other European countries, urban authorities were expected as part of the regulation called ‘the police’ to control the guilds and fix the prices on bread, meat, beer and other life necessities in order to avoid scarcity among the urban poor. In 1682–83 the Danish king established a police force in Copenhagen and the other market towns. The goal of the metropolitan police was to increase the population of the capital and thus increase the military-fiscal power of the absolutist state, by providing food security and even a comfortable life. In practice, the vigilant policing of bakers, butchers and brewers proved difficult. The positive economic effect of food policing was doubted early on and was reduced as a means to avoid food riots at the end the 18 th century. In a major provincial market town like Aalborg, the food trade was policed in a similar manner by the town council and the police, but especially the intermediate trade proved difficult to stop. In a tiny, agrarian market town like Saeby, food policing was more a question of feeding the poor with the town’s own products.

Protective Strategies and Emotions Invested in Early Modern Danish Christening Garments

In 2006–2007, Den Gamle By, National Open Air Museum of Urban History and Culture in Denmark staged a large exhibition of christening garments dating from the eighteenth century until the present. It was called “Christian Clothing and Baptismal Robes over 300 years.” More than 100 objects were exhibited. Garments for babies remind us of the vulnerability of the newborn and in this way they are emotional objects for us today and probably also in the past. Elements of vulnerability are especially obvious for modern viewers when the garments originate from earlier periods with much higher infant mortality rates than today. Parents in earlier centuries used various strategies to protect their small pagans from exposure to evil before baptism. In this way emotions were invested in the garments, but it is a challenge to access and analyze these emotions because the garments themselves do not constitute a language in the same way as written texts. The article will deal with three different material elements which might be considered protective strategies for babies. The first and longest part of the article presents the color red as a means of protection. The next section considers the use of metal as protection against evil and coins as vehicles of good fortune. The third and shortest section discusses the reuse of ritual garments in new ceremonial contexts. When their provenance is known, it is striking that several baptismal garments represent a reuse of garments from weddings or other rites de passage, as termed by Arnold van Gennep.

Word duration and grammatical and pragmatic function – the case of egentlig

The article investigates variation in the duration of the pronunciation of the Danish adverb egentlig in a large corpus of spoken modern Danish. The article shows that there is considerable variation in the duration of egentlig, and that this variation only to some extent can be explained by speech rate (or ‘articulation rate’). It is shown that the individual speaker has a significant impact on the variation. By the useof a mixed-model multiple linear regression analysis that incorporates the effect on duration that the individual speaker has, the investigation reveals that linguistic factors such as topology and utterance-final position together with factors relating to linguistic processing such as articulation rate and the position near a hesitation marker as well as nonlinguistic factors such as age and gender all contribute signifi cantly to the variation in the duration of egentlig. The results are discussed in relation to similar findings in the literature and the article proposes potential future topics of investigation in relation to phonetic reduction in spoken Danish in the basis of the results.

Philopatry in a changing world: response of pink-footed geese Anser brachyrhynchus to the loss of a key autumn staging area due to restoration of Filsø Lake, Denmark

Site fidelity is a strong and widespread feature of many waterfowl species, but little is known about the response of philopatric birds to changing environmental conditions at their preferred staging sites. In this study we analyse the response of pink-footed geese Anser brachyr- hynchus to the sudden loss of a major autumn staging area along their migration corridor, Filso in Denmark, which followed the re-establishment of a former lake on open arable land serving as foraging site to tens of thousands of geese. Comparisons of goose usage before and after the restoration event revealed that (1) approximately 80 % of pink-footed geese abandoned this staging area and (2) formerly site-faithful geese moved to other staging areas along the Danish west coast rather than moving further south to the Netherlands. Despite these significant changes in site use, the subsequent spring body condition of birds formerly philopatric to the Filso area was unaffected, suggesting that geese quickly moved to other areas and responded well to the sudden decline in available food at their formerly preferred staging site. These findings indi- cate that, at least for pink-footed geese, the cognitive plasticity necessary to alter site use allows a swift response to rapidly changing environmental conditions. This may partly be due to the agricultural habitat use of this species, leaving them plenty of alternatives in the modern Danish

Substantiviske Komplekse Ord Med Subkonfikser I Moderne Dansk

Abstract The article discusses various definitions of the Danish term konfiks (præ- and subkonfiks) as well as other, more recently coined, terms (e.g. komplekse ord) used within Danish, Norwegian, Swedish and German word formation. Section 3 includes a list of nominal subkonfikser present in modern Danish as well as examples thereof. The listed nouns have been classified based on whether their first component can exist independently or not. The summary section includes, amongst others, the productivity of subkonfikser as well as various restrictions regarding their use.

Reclaiming the Rural: Modern Danish Cooperative Living in Colonial Korea, 1925–37

Abstract During the Japanese Colonial Period, the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA), the Presbyterian Church, and the Ch’ŏndogyo rural movements collectively became one of the largest agrarian reconstruction campaigns. In order to materialize a vision of modernity centered on religion, agriculture, and a pastoral life, each of the three movements featured Danish-style cooperative systems. Praised as a model for modernizing an agriculture-based economy, Danish cooperatives were characterized as ideal mechanisms to pool the labor and resources of individual peasants and create enough economic power to negotiate the challenges of capitalism. To the leaders of the YMCA, Presbyterian Church, and Ch’ŏndogyo rural movements, cooperatives represented the best means to stem the collapse of agrarian society. Cooperatives further appealed to these leaders because they created a collective body of individuals that aimed to elevate life above all, including money and capital. This article analyzes why and how the YMCA, Presbyterian Church, and Ch’ŏndogyo rural leaders sought to reclaim, rather than restore, the past for the purpose of creating new beginnings in the present through Danish cooperative systems in order to realize their alternative visions of modernity.

Editorial: Vada a bordo

Editorial: Vada a bordo

Markedness, participation and grammatical paradigms: Jakobson and Hjelmslev revisited

The topic of this paper is markedness theory as initially developed in early works by Jakobson and Hjelmslev. The aim is to show how this early theory is (still) useful in the analysis of language-particular grammatical paradigms, and, further, to investigate which aspects of this early theory of markedness might still benefit from further refinements. One major point of this paper is to reinforce the notion of participation (a term originally suggested by Hjelmslev) as crucial in the understanding of markedness theory. Another major point is to show how the markedness relations of a paradigm depend not only on the members of the paradigm in question but also on the contexts in which the members of the paradigm are being used. Examples from Modern Danish grammar are given as illustration. The approach is functional-structural in the sense of Engberg-Pedersen et al. (1996).

Paradigm formation: Changes of function and structure in German and Danish mood systems

Recent studies in semantic change have agendas in common with the theory of grammaticalization and thus focus on processes of central interest to grammaticalization theory, namely generalization, bleaching and subjectification. One typical outcome of such processes is the addition of new diachronic meanings (“layering”), leading to a content side that involves more and more sprawling polysemic clusters. The study of morphological changes, however, provides instances of many other types of processes. This article discusses two such types: (1) a regrammation process, namely a change in paradigmatic organization, and (2) a specification of meaning, i.e. reduction rather than proliferation of meaning variants. Both will be illustrated with reference to the development of mood in German: it is a split from what was still in Middle High German one inflectional mood paradigm into three different mood paradigms in the modern standard High German language – and each of the separate paradigms involve a specification rather than proliferation in meaning. Our focus is on the characterization of semantic structure, but as in any usage-based grammatical model, the relation between structure and function is also considered. Former main functions of the subjunctive are promoted to the rank of structurally distinctive features between the modern paradigms, but the modern paradigm structure also contains content variation that was not grammaticalized in the older language – while other forms of content variation remains a matter of context of use. A comparison is offered with Middle Danish (showing a similar split of the older paradigm) and Modern Danish (the reverse process: loss of the distinction between the tense and mood paradigms). Again, regrammation processes like the ones studied show the importance of specification in semantic change and also of the importance of fine-grained language-specific analysis of grammatical content and its paradigmatic organization.

“PLUS THAT I BELIEVE IT IS AN INNOVATION....…” On the marginal construction with plus at as an initial conjunction in modern spoken Danish

This paper is about variation and how to make sense of it. It takes as its material a construction that has been treated as a new part of the system of Danish and Swedish, viz. the plus at ‘plus that’ construction. The corpus I have used to evaluate claims about this construction is the LANCHART corpus of spoken Danish from 1970 to 2010. The data from the LANCHART corpus show that the construction has a specific use (and function), that not very many informants use it and that those who do overwhelmingly use only one instance. Thus, the construction may safely be said to be marginal at least in the corpus data. The issue is how to theorize this. This is the theme of the final section.

Rare and odd compounds. On the spelling of compounds in modern Danish

Rare and odd compounds. On the spelling of compounds in modern Danish