Torben Juel Jensen

Generic variation? Developments in use of generic pronouns in late 20th century spoken Danish

In modern Danish, a handful of pronouns may be used to refer to a generic referent. In recent decades, the second person singular pronoun du has gained ground, apparently in parallel to similar recent developments in other languages. Even though generic du may not be as old as the traditional generic pronoun man, it is not a new variant in Danish if we by “new” mean that it has come into existence within the last 30–40 years. To all appearances, it has been used before the influence from English became significant in the last part of the 20th century, and the generic du as such need therefore not be explained by contact with English, as often assumed. In order to study the spread of the generic use of du we analysed the use of pronouns with generic reference in a large sample of speakers, most of whom were recorded during sociolinguistic interviews twice – the first time in the period 1978–1989 and the second time in 2005–07. The speakers come from four locations in Denmark, and three different age cohorts are represented in the study. The results show both a rise and a decline in the use of generic du in the time interval from the 1970s and 1980s till today in accordance with the hypothesis that the increased use of generic du began in Copenhagen and started spreading from Copenhagen to the rest of the country before the time of the old recordings in the 1980s. However, the use of generic du has peaked, or is about to peak, in the Danish speech community seen as a whole, and the developments in the use of generic pronouns should probably be seen within an overall perspective of stable variation.

From community to conversation – and back. Exploring the interpersonal potentials of two generic pronouns in Danish

This paper combines a quantitative study of the two most important Danish pronouns used for generic reference, du and man, with interaction analyses. The quantitative study shows an overall increase in the use of generic du at the expense of man. However, a large scale quantitative study alone cannot tell us much about the finer differences between the two variants, let alone come up with explanations for the change in their use. In this paper, we demonstrate a way to supplement a quantitative study with detailed interaction analyses with the aim of interpreting the tendencies demonstrated in the quantitative study. Whereas there is no difference between generic du and man with respect to propositional meaning, our interactional analyses reveal important differences in their interpersonal potentials: Generic du is to a larger degree than man used as a resource for enactment and involvement. This difference between du and man is due to du retaining some of its second person meaning also when used generically, and the rise in the use of generic du is likely to reflect an ongoing process of intimization in the society at large.

Past participles of strong verbs in Jutland Danish: A real-time study of regionalization and standardization

��������� � �� ���������� The article presents a real-time study of standardization and regionalization processes with respect to the use of past participles of strong verbs in the western part of Denmark. Analyses of a large corpus of recordings of informants from two localities show that the use of the dialectal en form of the past participle suffix has been in decline during the last 30 years. The en forms are replaced by three other forms, one of which is (partly) dialectal, one regional and one standard Danish. The study indicates that a regionalization process has taken place prior to the time period studied, but that it has now been overtaken by a Copenhagen-based standardization process. The study also shows interesting differences between the two localities, arguably due to the geographical location and size, and to the status of the different participle forms in the traditional local dialects.

Forgrunding af ledsætninger – et psykolingvistisk forsøg

It is a common phenomenon in spoken language that the main point of an utterance is found in a syntactically subordinated clause instead of in its matrix clause. This is the case in constructions where the matrix clause is semantically secondary as well as in subclauses with V>Adv word order in Danish. We argue that such subclauses are foregrounded, and that a foregrounded subclause will attract more attention than a non-foregrounded. To test this, we have conducted an experiment under the Text Change paradigm. Results show that readers pay significantly more attention to the subclause in constructions with semantically secondary matrix clauses than in constructions with semifactive matrix clauses, and, in the latter constructions, more attention to subclauses with V>Adv word order than with Adv>V word order.