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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: [email protected]
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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
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Copyright
© The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Nordic Association of Linguistics

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