Mood in Danish

A distributional approach to functional Danish subclause classification

“…Investigating their distributional properties further seems to yield the following pattern: any time clause introduced by da may function (at least) as an adverbial, a direct object, a prepositional object or an attribute, for example: Further, when functioning as for example adverbials, da-clauses may occur in the initial position of their superordinate clause, in Danish grammar known as the fundament (e.g. Christensen and Heltoft 2010;Hansen and Heltoft 2011). They may of course occur in other positions as well, but as the analyses will illustrate, focusing on the fundament position reveals interesting distributional differences.…”

“…A motivation for including the V2 criterion is that it highlights an important semantic relation between V2 subclauses and (other) appendix clauses, in that V2 word order is typically tied to content properties such as "informativity", "assertiveness" and/or status as "main point of utterance", as discussed in for example Wiklund et al (2009), Christensen andHeltoft (2010), Hansen and Heltoft (2011), and T.J. Jensen (2011) -a point illustrated in (98) The V2 structure enforces the independent assertiveness of the subclause, which is illustrated by the fact that the positive tag question ik' ('right') obtains its polarity from the subclause itself, not the (negative) superordinate clause, thus assigning the subclause more or less its own speech act status (for similar analyses of, for example, tag questions as "primary" vs. "secondary" status indicators, see Boye and Harder 2007). Treating V2 subclauses as appendix clauses in other words acknowledges important aspects of both their expression and content side.…”

Wh-Optatives in Danish: Compositional and Noncompositional Aspects

“…Finally, the wh -constituent can only refer to the speaker (as also hinted at in Christensen & Heltoft 2010:95) 14 . Recall that all wh -optatives have been paraphrased with the 1st person singular pronoun I .…”

“…The speaker wishes (s)he had been thirty at a time in the past. Thus, the past tense marking in optatives expresses counterfactuality (see also Christensen & Heltoft 2010:88). It describes a world distant from the world of the speaker.…”

“…This particular optative construction appears to have received very little attention in the literature. It is frequently mentioned as an optative, (see, among others, Hansen 1967, vol 2:200, Christensen 2009:124, and Christensen & Heltoft 2010:88), but no analysis is provided; it is not discussed as an optative clause in Hansen & Heltoft 2011 either. Interestingly, this kind of optative is not observed in German or English even though both languages have wh -clauses of this kind as free relatives and embedded interrogatives 2 .…”