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Part of
Constructional Approaches to Nordic Languages
Edited by Evie Coussé, Steffen Höder, Benjamin Lyngfelt and Julia Prentice
[Constructional Approaches to Language 37] 2023
► pp. 55–80

Chapter 3
One man’s [ɕœtː] is another man’s [kʰøð̞]

Sound correspondence constructions in Interscandinavian decoding

| Kiel University

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.

Keywords: Diasystematic Construction Grammar, receptive multilingualism, decoding, phonology, submorphemic level
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
Published online: 7 November 2023
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/cal.37.03hag
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