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Constructional Approaches to Nordic Languages
Edited by Evie Coussé, Steffen Höder, Benjamin Lyngfelt and Julia Prentice
[Constructional Approaches to Language 37] 2023
► pp. 247–275

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.

Keywords: negation, minimizers, negative-with-minimizer construction, grammaticalization, Norwegian, context expansion, maxim of extravagance, collexeme analysis
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
  • References
Published online: 7 November 2023
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/cal.37.09vin
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Corpora

HaBiT = Harvesting big text data for under-resourced languages, Norwegian Web 2015 (Bokmål)
URL: [URL]
Nasjonalbiblioteket
2015 NB N-gram. URL: [URL]