Sentence intertwining in Danish, seen from a Functional Grammar perspective

VP anaphora and verb-second order in Danish

“…Unlike the fronting in (47b), this involves movement out of a complex NP and one might therefore expect a contrast between (47b) and (48b), in particular that (48b) be ungrammatical. Its grammaticality is consistent with observations by Erteschik-Shir (1973: 32–49) and Jakobsen (1996) that complex NPs are not generally islands in Danish. Thus, from a language-internal perspective there is nothing surprising about (48b) and in terms of my analysis of fronting, it works exactly like (47b): matrix C bears atop and thereby attracts det to matrix Spec-CP.…”

Sætningsknuder i dansk

“…For det andet er helsaetningens neksusfelt den foretrukne plads for modale elementer (se bl.a. Falster Jakobsen 1995). Ved at inddrage Heltofts (1986b) revision af Diderichsens feltskema er det muligt at vise at en saetningsknude med epistemisk matrixpraedikat topologisk kan sammenlignes med en konstruktion med et modalverbum.…”

Flexibility of frequent clause openers in talk-in-interaction:Det‘it, that’ andså‘then’ in the prefield in Danish

“…Jeg 'I' is the grammatical subject, and det is rather a constituent in a subordinate clause which is ultimately never realized (this is known as a knude construction or sentence intertwining; e.g. Jakobsen 1995, Jensen 2002. Depending on how the clause would have been formed, it could have been subject, object, or prepositional object of that subordinate clause, as shown in the constructed examples in (8a-c).…”

“…Depending on how the clause would have been formed, it could have been subject, object, or prepositional object of that subordinate clause, as shown in the constructed examples in (8a-c). In these examples, the canonical position of the prefield constituent is indicated with 0, following Jakobsen (1995). 8 While the clause in line 2 in (7) was in all probability not abandoned due to the format, but rather due to Adam's overlapping parody, it remains the case that a standardized clause format with a semantically and syntactically flexible first position is very advantageous to language users when interacting in real time.…”