Unit accentuation as an expression device for predicate formation in Danish?

Abstract

In the present paper, I discuss some results of an empirical investigation of spontaneous speech in Danish concerning Unit Accentuation with special reference to stress reduction in contentive verbs in various morphosyntactic contexts.

The reference frame for my description is Simon C. Dik and followers' Functional Grammar (FG) as expounded in Dik (1989) - both because this work is, as yet, the most updated framework of Functionalism, and because my own version of the functional paradigm is not supposed to be known (an extensive exposition is Nedergaard Thomsen 1991). Needless to say, my model is adduced throughout.

My results indicate that several corrections have to be made within FG in order for this theory to be typologically adequate as regards the description of Danish: thus e.g. its model of the layered structure of the clause (with the distinction between Arguments and Satellites) has to be modified so as to include a more nuclear layer $#x201C;around” the predicate, the ‘Nucleus’. This layer consists of semantic material at least some of which constitutes a conceptual unit with the predicate. Only nuclear sentence members trigger Unit Accentuation.

Unit Accentuation is clearly grammatically obligatory in some contexts, and excluded in others. However, it is observed in cases where it is grammatically excluded. In some of these cases, it seems to be motivated by semantic extensions of prototypes. Thus, Unit Accentuation should be conceived of as a productive rule.

Not only ideational factors, but also textual-pragmatic (‘theticity’, cf. Sasse 1987) and $#x201C;rhetorical” factors (‘idiomaticily’, cf. Chafe 1968) may determine Unit Accentuation. In all its distributions, UA encodes conceptual units.

I hypothesize that Unit Accentuation in verb headed hypotagms is a coding device for (the $#x201C;formation” of) derived/marked predicates. Due to the fact that at least some of the semantic factors conditioning stress reduction correspond to categories that undergo morphological ‘Noun Incorporation’ in e.g. agglutinating or polysynthetic languages, viz. e.g. non-referential $#x201C;objects”, I have made the generalization that Unit Accentuation is a manifestation of syntactic Incorporation. What perhaps is special to Danish is the Incorporation of e.g. local, translocal, predicative, existential, and adverbial (including several types of verbal particles) verbal modifiers.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ole Nedergaard Thomsen

The present paper is based on some results of part of a project on which I was engaged from January 1989 until February 1990: Prosody in Spontaneous Danish Speech (funded by the Danish Research Council for the Humanities (SHF)), c/o Dept. of General and Applied Linguistics (IAAS), University of Copenhagen, Denmark; the empirical investigation has been undertaken in collaboration with Birgitte Jacobsen, formerly at IAAS; my present affiliation: IAAS. I am grateful to Nina Grønnum, IAAS, Hans Basbøll, OUC, Hartmut Haberland, RUC, and Birgitte Jacobsen for useful comments and corrections; and to Jann Scheuer, SHF/IAAS, for the raw counts of the empirical codings. The paper has also profited from discussions on a seminar on Functional Grammar, spring 1990: thanks to Birgitte Jacobsen, Eli Fischer-Jørgensen, Jørgen Rischel, Lars Kristoffersen, Lisbeth Falster-Jakobsen, Michael Fortescue, and Peter Harder. I likewise want to thank the discussants of a students' meeting for their bright comments - thanks to Benedicte Nielsen, Bent Danielsen, and Henrik Aagesen. Special thanks go to Henning Andersen, UCLA, for kind discussions on a morning $#x201C;between two planes”, spring 1990, and for invaluable, written comments.