Chapter 3
One man’s [ɕœtː] is another man’s [kʰøð̞]
Sound correspondence constructions in Interscandinavian
decoding
The three Continental Scandinavian languages Danish, Norwegian and
Swedish are closely related and share a large pool of Interscandinavian
cognates, but a variety of phonological differences between the languages
can obscure the lexical similarities and make spoken Interscandinavian
communication a challenge for untrained listeners. It is therefore
advantageous to know about sound correspondences, and applying sound
correspondence ‘rules’ is thought to be one of the major strategies in
Interscandinavian decoding. How speakers analyse, acquire and utilize such
phonological patterns has not been investigated so far, however – neither
theoretically nor empirically. Using example correspondences between Danish
and Swedish, the chapter illustrates how the acquisition of sound
correspondence rules could look like from a Construction Grammar
perspective, more precisely, from the perspective of Diasystematic
Construction Grammar (Höder,
2018). It models knowledge about sound correspondences as a
combination of two language-specific constructions and one cross-linguistic
language-unspecific construction capturing the equivalence relation between
the two language-specific ones. Besides specific sound correspondence
constructions, also the acquisition of more abstract constructions
presenting a generalization over several specific correspondences is
illustrated. The cognitive plausibility of sound correspondence
constructions at different levels of abstraction is discussed against the
background of an ongoing debate in the CxG community about higher-order
schemas.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Previous views on Interscandinavian decoding
- 3.Implicit learning of correspondence rules
- 4.Problems in Danish-Swedish intercommunication
- 5.The theoretical approach
- 6.Analysis: Acquisition of Danish-Swedish sound
correspondence
constructions
- 6.1Acquisition of a specific sound correspondence pattern
- 6.2Acquisition of an abstract sound correspondence pattern
- 7.Discussion
- 8.Conclusion
-
Notes
-
References