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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. 212–246

Chapter 8
Danish verb prefixes and the schematizing transitive prefix construction

| University of Copenhagen
In a constructionist approach to grammar, morphological constructions and clausal constructions may have the same theoretical status as argument structure constructions (e.g., Goldberg, 1995, pp. 22–23; Croft, 2001; Booij, 2010). In this chapter, the author argues that the Danish verb prefixes be- and for-, in addition to verbal derivation, impose a lexeme-independent transitive argument structure construction with three meaning variants. In a large-scale corpus study, a distributional analysis of the prefix construction and its association with verbal base lexemes shows that the two constructional variants have a different semantic profile. While the potential productivity of be- and for- constructions is restricted, authentic examples of creative usage show that all constructional variants are partially productive in present-day Danish.
Keywords: Danish, prefix constructions, argument structure constructions, verbal derivation, morphological constructions, productivity, creative usage
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Background
    • 2.1The German be-construction
    • 2.2The English be-construction
  • 3.The Danish STP construction
    • 3.1Meaning variants and usage patterns
      • 3.1.1(A) Transitive relation with manner-specification
      • 3.1.2(B) Transitive relation with transfer/means-specification
      • 3.1.3(C) Transitive relation with result-specification
      • 3.1.4Meaning variants, usage patterns and productivity
  • 4.Corpus analysis
  • 5.Summarizing the semantics of the STP construction
  • 6.Innovative usage
    • 6.1Transitive relation with manner-specification
    • 6.2Transitive relation with transfer/means-specification
    • 6.3Transitive relation with result-specification
  • 7.Concluding remarks
  • Notes
  • References
  • Appendix
Published online: 7 November 2023
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/cal.37.08ped
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