Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-fbnjt Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-11T07:01:20.107Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The syntax of something: Evaluative affordances of noget in Danish construction grammar

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 September 2020

Carsten Levisen
Carsten Levisen*
Affiliation:
Institute for Communication and Arts, Roskilde University, Universitetsvej 1, 4000Roskilde, Denmark
*
Email for correspondence: calev@ruc.dk
Get access

Abstract

This paper explores ‘the evaluative noget construction’ in Danish. The construction consists of noget ‘something’ juxtaposed by a noun in an evaluative frame such as e.g. Det er noget pjat, ‘It’s nonsense’. With a starting point in cross-linguistic studies on something, the paper moves on to explore core members of this evaluative class in Danish, providing a detailed semantic analysis of the construction’s core configurations. The affordance of noget ‘something’ to mean ‘something bad’ is a key to understanding the construction, and from this general premise the class of evaluatives take off in multiple negative directions, providing a snapshot of the Danish linguaculture of evaluation. The paper argues for a Cultural Construction Grammar that can bring together the lexicogrammatical integrationism of construction grammar approaches with the linguacultural holism of the research in ethnosyntax. The goal is to provide high-definition analysis of complex, language-specific constructions in a simple, globally translatable metalanguage.

Keywords

construction grammarDanish languageethnosyntaxevaluative languagemetalinguistics
Type
Research Article
Information
Nordic Journal of Linguistics , Volume 44 , Issue 1 , May 2021 , pp. 3 - 24
Check for updates
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Nordic Association of Linguistics

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Arle, Solveig. 2018. Hur används primord för att skriva lättläst? En undersökning av tre återberättade romancer [How semantic primes are used in easy-to-read writing: an investigation of three retold novels]. MA thesis, Helsinki University.Google Scholar
Burridge, Kate. 2002. Changes within Pennsylvania German grammar as enactments of Anabaptist world view. In Enfield (ed.), 207–230.Google Scholar
Christensen, Tanya Karoli & Jensen, Torben Juel. 2018. Og sådan noget i den stil: Generelle udvidere i moderne dansk talesprog [On general extenders in modern spoken Danish]. In Tanya Karoli, Christensen, Christina, Fogtmann, Torben Juel, Jensen, Martha Sif, Karrebæk, Marie, Maegaard, Nicolai, Pharao & Pia, Quist (eds.), Dansk til det 21. århundrede: Sprog og samfund [Danish for the 21st century: Language and society], 73–91. København: University Press.Google Scholar
Croft, William A. & Cruse, D. Alan. 2004. Cognitive Linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Enfield, N. J. 2002a. Ethnosyntax: Introduction. In Enfield (ed.), 3–30.Google Scholar
Enfield, N. J. (ed). 2002b. Ethnosyntax: Explorations in Grammar and Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Fried, Mirjam & Östman, Jan-Ola. 2004. Construction Grammar in a Cross-language Perspective. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Gehweiler, Elke. 2010. Interjections and expletives. In Wolfram, Bublitz, Jucker, Andreas H. & Schneider, Klaus P. (eds.), Historical Pragmatics, 315–350. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton.Google Scholar
Gladkova, Anna. 2014. Ethnosyntax. In Farzad, Sharifian (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Language and Culture, 33–50. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Goddard, Cliff. 2002. Ethnosyntax, ethnopragmatics, sign-functions, and culture. In Enfield (ed.), 52–73.Google Scholar
Goddard, Cliff. 2010. The natural semantic metalanguage approach. In Bernd, Heine & Heiko, Narrog (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Linguistic Analysis, 459–484. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Goddard, Cliff. 2015. “Swear words” and “curse words” in Australian (and American) English: At the crossroads of pragmatics, semantics and sociolinguistics. Intercultural Pragmatics 12(2), 189–218.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Goddard, Cliff. 2018. Ten Lectures on Natural Semantic Metalanguage: Exploring Language, Thought and Culture using Simple, Translatable Words. Leiden: Brill.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Goddard, Cliff & Karlsson, Susanna. 2008. Rethinking THINK in contrastive perspective: Swedish v. English. In Cliff, Goddard (ed.), Cross-linguistic Semantics, 225–240. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Goddard, Cliff & Wierzbicka, Anna. 1994. Semantic and Lexical Universals: Theory and Empirical Findings. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Goddard, Cliff & Wierzbicka, Anna. 2002. Meaning and Universal Grammar: Theory and Empirical Findings. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Goddard, Cliff & Wierzbicka, Anna. 2014. Words and Meanings: Semantics across Domains, Languages and Cultures. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Goddard, Cliff & Ye, Zhengdao. 2016. “Happiness” and “Pain” across Languages and Cultures. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Goldberg, Adele. 1995. A Construction Grammar Approach to Argument Structure. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Goldberg, Adele. 2003. Constructions: A new theoretical approach to language. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 7, 219–224.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Goldberg, Adele. 2006. Constructions at Work: The Nature of Generalization in Language. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Habib, Sandy. 2017. The meanings of ‘angel’ in English, Arabic, and Hebrew. In Zhengdao, Ye (ed.), The Semantics of Nouns, 89–119. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Habib, Sandy. 2019. NSM substantives: The Arabic and Hebrew exponents of six simple, universal concepts. International Journal of Arabic Linguistics 5(2), 188–207.Google Scholar
Hall, Edward T. 1959. The Silent Language. New York: Doubleday.Google Scholar
Hansen, Erik & Heltoft, Lars. 2011. Grammatik over det Danske Sprog. Odense: Syddansk Universitetsforlag.Google Scholar
Hilpert, Martin. 2014. Construction Grammar and Its Application to English. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.Google Scholar
Leavitt, John. 2011. Linguistic Relativities: Language Diversity and Modern Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Levisen, Carsten. 2012. Cultural Semantics and Social Cognition: A Case Study on the Danish Universe of Meaning. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton.Google Scholar
Levisen, Carsten. 2013. On pigs and people: The porcine semantics of Danish interaction and cognition. Australian Journal of Linguistics 33(3), 344–364.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Levisen, Carsten. 2016. Postcolonial lexicography: Defining creole emotion words with the Natural Semantic Metalanguage. Cahiers de Lexicologie 109(2), 35–60.Google Scholar
Levisen, Carsten. 2018. The grammar of violence: Insights from Danish ethnosyntax and the Wierzbicka–Pinker debate. Etnolingwistyka 30, 145–168.Google Scholar
Levisen, Carsten. 2020. Postcolonial prepositions: Semantics and popular geopolitics in the Danosphere. In Kerry, Mullan, Bert, Peeters & Lauren, Sadow (eds.), Studies in Ethnopragmatics, Cultural Semantics and Intercultural Communication: Meaning and Culture, 169–186. Singapore: Springer.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Levisen, Carsten & Waters, Sophia. 2017. Cultural Keywords in Discourse. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Linell, Per. 2019. The written language bias (WLB) in linguistics 40 years after. In Simon Borchmann, Carsten Levisen & Britta Schneider (eds.), Biases in Linguistics: Special issue of Language Sciences 76, 101230.Google Scholar
Löfstrand, Anna, 2013. En jämförelse mellan ord för ansiktsuttryck på svenska och mandarin. En intervju- och korpusbaserad studie [A comparison between words for facial expressions in Swedish and Mandarin: A combined interview-and-corpus study]. MA thesis, Stockholm University.Google Scholar
Lyngfelt, Benjamin, Borin, Lars, Ohara, Kyoko & Torrent, Tiago Timponi. 2018. Constructicography: Constructicon Development across Languages. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
ODC, bras, Noun. Ordbogen.com (accessed 2020).Google Scholar
ODC, juks, Noun. Ordbogen.com (accessed 2020).Google Scholar
Peeters, Bert (ed.). 2006. Semantics Primes and Universal Grammar: Empirical Evidence from the Romance Languages. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Peeters, Bert (ed.). 2015. Language and Cultural Values: Adventures in Applied Ethnolinguistics: Special issue of International Journal of Language and Culture 2(2).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tien, Adrian. 2009. Semantic prime HAPPEN in Mandarin Chinese: In search of a viable exponent. Pragmatics & Cognition 17(2), 356–382.Google Scholar
Weth, Constanze & Juffermans, Kasper (eds.). 2018. Introduction: The tyranny of writing in language and society. In Weth, Constanze & Juffermans, Kasper (eds.), The Tyrany of Writing: Ideologies of the Written Word, 1–17. London: Bloomsbury.Google Scholar
Wierzbicka, Anna. 1979. Ethno-syntax and the philosophy of grammar. Studies in Language 3(3), 313–383.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wierzbicka, Anna. 1988. The Semantics of Grammar. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Wierzbicka, Anna. 2013. Imprisoned in English: The Hazards of English as a Default Language. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Wong, Jock & Ye, Zhengdao. 2016. Chinese semantic primes, with English equivalents. https://www.griffith.edu.au/humanities-languages/school-humanities-languages-social-science/research/natural-semantic-metalanguage-homepage/resources (accessed 2020).Google Scholar