The Development of Complex Predicates from Old Danish to Modern Danish

A Diachronic Survey of the Connection between Case, Bare Nouns, and Stress Pattern

Abstract

This study describes the development of complex predicates from Early Middle Danish (ca. 1100–ca. 1350) through Late Middle Danish (ca. 1350–ca. 1525) and Early Modern Danish (ca. 1525–ca. 1700) to Modern Danish (post-1700) as a change from an unmarked to a marked mode of expression. In Modern Danish, the characteristic features of complex predicates such as ₒbage 'kage ‘to bake a cake’ are the unit accentuation between the unstressed verb and the stressed noun and the bare form of the noun, marking the combinations as lexically fixed expressions with non-referential complements. Since stress markers are absent from Old Danish (ca. 800–ca. 1525) texts, we are unable to tell whether unstressed verbs were also a clear characteristic of complex predicates during this period. However, topological factors make the usage of unit accentuation between verbs and non-referential complements in most of the period unlikely. Considering the fact that words in the final position of a syntactic accentual sequence are normally stressed to a greater or lesser extent (Rischel 1983; Jacobs 1999; Basbøll 2005; Grønnum 2009; Petersen 2010), the presence of OV word order in Old Danish texts with the complement in a preverbal position presumably rules out the usage of unit accentuation in spoken language. Furthermore, bare nouns, which are referentially marked in Modern Danish, making them compatible with complex predicates, were referentially unmarked in Early Middle Danish (Jensen 2007a). This means that the formal features of complex predicates in Modern Danish were absent from Old Danish. Therefore, the diachronic analysis in this study takes the functional features of complex predicates as its starting point. Based on an analysis of the case system in the Scanian dialect of Early Middle Danish, I formulate the hypothesis that, in Early Middle Danish, a bare noun with an underspecified case form was referentially unmarked and thereby compatible with complex predicates, whereas a noun with a specified case form was marked as a referential entity in the universe of discourse. By way of this, I assign new functional categories to hitherto unexplained changes in the case system. Since bare nouns in Late Middle Danish were only used non-referentially, particularly as complements in complex predicates, the markedness relation between determinate and bare nouns had been inverted by this point. In the subsequent statistical analysis of the development of word order in Early Modern Danish from the beginning of the 16th century to the beginning of the 18th century in texts written in both a controlled, revised language and a spontaneous, unrevised language, I delineate how the VO structure was gradually established in written language, thereby signalizing the potential presence of unit accentuation in spoken language. At this stage of the language change process, the unstressed verb, functioning as a desemanticized light verb, made complex predicates lexically marked. The fact that the VO structure was first fully developed in texts written in a spontaneous language and in complex predicates and periphrastic verb phrases in texts of both kinds and all registers indicates that unit accentuation was actualized in spoken language long before the standardization of VO word order in written language.