Chapter 9
Minimizers as negative reinforcers in Norwegian
This chapter presents a corpus-based investigation of Norwegian
negative-with-minimizer constructions (e.g. ikke forstå en
tøddel ‘not understand an umlaut’). The results from collexeme
analyses suggest that even though many minimizers are strongly associated
with a small set of verbs, indicating high idiomaticity, the combination of
these minimizers with semantically mismatching verbs (e.g. ikke bry
seg en tøddel ‘not care an umlaut’) is also used. There is no
obvious evidence for pragmatic ambiguity in many of these cases, and it is
argued that the context expansion and grammaticalization of some negative
reinforcers in Norwegian (e.g., en døyt ‘a duit’) is due to
the pragmatic effect of the semantic mismatch, and that this usage is
motivated by the maxim of extravagance.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Background: Negative constructions and negative reinforcement
- 2.1The grammaticalization of minimizers as negative reinforcers
- 2.2Minimizing expressions in Norwegian
- 3.Data and method
- 3.1Data selection
- 3.2Collexeme analysis
- 4.Results and analysis
- 4.1Minimizers, lexical domains and context sensitivity
- 4.2Morpho-syntactic properties
- 4.2.1Definiteness
- 4.2.2Number
- 4.2.3Syntactic functions
- 5.Discussion
- 5.1Minimizers and extravagant speech behavior
- 5.2Coercion with a low degree of lexical persistence
- 5.3Propagation and grammaticalization of minimizers
- 6.Conclusion
-
Notes
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References