The syntax of something: Evaluative affordances ofnogetin Danish construction grammar

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.

Cognitive Cultural Semantics

“…5 While keyword research focuses on cognitive cultural semantics in the lexical expression of meaning, work on the grammatical expression of meaning has also been an important part of NSM research from its onset. New NSM-based research on "cultural construction grammar" (Levisen 2018b(Levisen , 2021 follows up from Wierzbicka's seminal work "ethnosyntax" (1979, 2002). Embracing the view that "grammar is thick with cultural meaning" (Enfield 2002:3), cultural construction grammar interacts with the family of approaches called "construction grammar", which seeks to account for the meaning not only of single words and fixed expressions, but the "constructicon" at large (Lyngfelt et al 2018).…”

“…Caviglia et al 2017;Fernández 2020b), linguistic anthropology (e.g. Levisen 2019aLevisen , 2021, postcolonial language studies (e.g. Levisen forthcoming; Mašková 2022), historical and literary linguistics (e.g.…”