Generic variation? Developments in use of generic pronouns in late 20^thcentury spoken Danish

Abstract

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 20 th 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 twicethe 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.

Diffusion of language change: Accommodation to a moving target

“…The rest of the pronouns with generic reference are occurrences of man and en . The latter two come close to a complementary distribution: man is used exclusively in contexts where the pronoun functions as the grammatical subject; and en almost only where it does not function as subject (Jensen ).…”

“…Bolinger ; Kitagawa and Lehrer ; Blondeau ; Berman ; Hyman ). Quantitative work on variation and change in the use of second person pronouns versus other pronouns for generic reference includes studies of French, the first being Laberge's study of indefinite pronouns in Montreal French (Laberge ; Laberge and Sankoff ) and, more recently, of Danish (Jensen ; Nielsen, Fogtmann and Jensen ). These studies find that the use of personal pronouns is indeed an area of grammar which exhibits much variation – probably, as Coveney () points out, because of the close association of these pronouns with social relationships.…”

“…clauses interrupted before an interpretable intentional meaning has been expressed). The resulting 31,908 tokens were coded with respect to a number of syntactic and semantic factors that might influence the choice between du and other generic pronouns (Jensen ). As the focus of this article is on the geographical diffusion patterns, we only briefly mention the three linguistic factors which turned out to be important and which we added to the statistical model presented below (see Jensen for a more thorough discussion of the linguistic factors).…”

Convergence in generic pronouns: Language contact and Faroesemann

“…In the following, I compare these results to the constraints on the mand u variation in Danish. Note that the Danish material (Jensen 2009a(Jensen , 2009bMaegaard et al 2013) focuses on du rather than manan inverse focus compared to the main interest in this articleand that the Danish multivariate analysis (Maegaard et al 2013, 33-34) uses different methods; in particular, their analysis uses treatment contrasts as opposed to Rbrul's sum contrasts (see Johnson 2009, 361). The methods are not directly mutually convertible; Table 5 gives an approximate summary of the Danish results in a format compatible with Rbrul output.…”

“…The patterns of variation and change with regard to generic pronouns in Danish, in particular du, have been the subject of intensive research in recent years (Jensen 2009a(Jensen , 2009bNielsen, Fosgerau, and Jensen 2009;Maegaard (6) (Jensen 2009a, 88) et al 2013). These studies form an excellent comparison for the current study of Faroese.…”