The Danish word øv is traditionally categorized as an interjection. However, in a set of data primarily from chat conversations, several instances of øv do not match any traditional definition of interjections: It is syntactically integrated and thus does not constitute a full utterance on its own, and its semantic-pragmatic use is more nuanced than “expressing an aspect of the speaker’s mental state”. Th e main part of the article is a functionally-based analysis of these instances of øv, the insights from which are used to question the general practice of lexical categorization. I argue that a pragmatically based model of categorization is better able to account for the full range of uses for a word form.

Phonaesthemes are a common phenomenon, but they are generally not in paradigmatic opposition like morphemes are (Svantesson 2017: 6). Reta, however, has a phonaesthemic contrast /l/~/r/, where /r/-colouring of neutral base words signifies an increase in vulgarity, intensity, size or severity (e.g. ɓela ‘bad’ vs. ɓera ‘terrible’, -ool ‘penis’ vs. -oor ‘cock’). This paper describes this phenomenon in detail, and provides a discussion as to whether it is best classified as morphological, phonaesthemic, or otherwise. We argue that, although some of the cross-linguistic criteria for phonaesthemes exclude phonaesthemic /r/ from being classified as such, it is not straightforwardly classified as either phonological or morphological. Using Kwon & Round’s (2015) criteria for phonaesthesia and derivational morphology, we compare Reta phonaesthemes to similar phenomena in other languages. We argue that such alternations differ from phonaesthemes and morphology in fundamental ways, and are best construed as a distinct cross-linguistic category.

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The Danish pronoun de and its inflections are traditionally described as 3rd person plural, but, as this article demonstrates, it is also used as a gender neutral 3rd person singular pronoun. As this pronoun – termed singular de – has not been documented or described in the literature thus far, the purpose of this article is to provide a grammatical description and analysis of singular de and its referential use in interaction. This is based on 104 occurrences of singular de in naturally occurring conversation. It is found that singular de is used with both generic and specific reference, and that interlocutors may use singular de to avoid indexing gender and orienting to it as a relevant topic in talk-in- interaction (gender-unspecified reference) or to index the referent’s gender as neither male nor female (gender-specified reference). The article also parallels between singular de and English singular they, as well as sociolinguistic variation in the use of singular de which could be topics for future studies.