Cover not available
Part of
Nominal Compound Acquisition
Edited by Wolfgang U. Dressler, F. Nihan Ketrez and Marianne Kilani-Schoch
[Language Acquisition and Language Disorders 61] 2017
► pp. 39–62

Chapter 2
Compound nouns in Danish child language

| | University of Southern Denmark
|

This chapter presents a study of the development of compound nouns in Danish children and gives an introduction to compounding in Danish. We examine the compound nouns in child directed speech (CDS) and child speech (CS) in recordings of four Danish children from the first occurrence (at the ages of 1;7, 1;7, 1;7 and 1;10) up to the ages of 2;5, 2;5, 2;11 and 3;11, respectively. We found that the vast majority of compounds are endocentric N+N compounds. The development goes from prototypical compounds to more complex compounds. In general, we see very much the same picture in CS as in CDS.

Keywords: Danish, compounds, first language acquisition, prosody, word-formation
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Compounding in Danish
  • 3.Compound nouns in Danish
    • 3.1Endocentric compounds
    • 3.2Exocentric compounds
    • 3.3Coordinative compounds
    • 3.4Morphosemantically opaque compounds
  • 4.Data and method
  • 5.Results: Compound nouns in Danish CS and CDS
  • 6.Summary and further analyses
    • 6.1The first compound contrasts
    • 6.2Morphosemantically opaque compounds
    • 6.3Swapped elements
    • 6.4As substitute for a conventional word
    • 6.5Innovative compound nouns (neologisms)
  • 7.CDS versus CS
  • 8.Lexical typology
  • 9.Concluding remarks
  • Notes
  • References
  • Author query
Published online: 19 December 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/lald.61.03kja
References (23)
Allan, R., Holmes, P. & Lundskær-Nielsen, T.
1995 Danish: A Comprehensive Grammar. New York, NY: Routledge.Google Scholar
Basbøll, H.
2005 The Phonology of Danish. Oxford: OUP.Google Scholar
Basbøll, H., Bleses, D., Cadierno, T., Jensen, A., Ladegaard, H. J., Madsen, T. & Thomsen, P.
2002 The Odense Language Acquisition Project. Child Language Bulletin 22: 11–12.Google Scholar
Basbøll, H., Kjærbæk, L. & Lambertsen, C.
2011 The Danish noun plural landscape. Acta Linguistica Hafniensia: International Journal of Linguistics 43(2): 81–105.  DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bauer, L.
2011[2009] IE, Germanic: Danish. In The Oxford Handbook of Compounding, R. Lieber & P. Štekauer (eds), 400–416. Oxford: OUP.Google Scholar
Bick, E.
2001 En Constraint Grammar Parser for Dansk (A constraint grammar parser for Danish). In 8. Møde om Udforskningen af Dansk Sprog (8th Meeting about the Study of Danish Language), M. Kunøe & P. Widdell (eds), 40–50. Aarhus: Aarhus University.Google Scholar
Den Danske Ordbog
(The Danish Dictionary), Vols. 1–6 2003–2005 Det Danske Sprog- og Litteraturselskab.Google Scholar
Eriksson, M., Marschik, P. B., Tulviste, T., Almgren, M., Pereira, M. P., Wehberg, S., Marjanovič-Umek, L., Gayraud, F., Kovačević, M. & Gallego, C.
2012 Differences between girls and boys in emerging language skills: Evidence from 10 language communities. British Journal of Development Psychology 30: 326–343.  DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hansen, E.
1977 Dæmonernes Port (Gate of the demons). Copenhagen: Hans Reitzel.Google Scholar
Hansen, E. & Heltoft, L.
2011 Grammatik Over Det Danske Sprog I (Grammar of the Danish Language I). Copenhagen: Det Danske Sprog- og Litteraturselskab.Google Scholar
Herslund, M.
2001 The Danish s-genitive: From affix to clitic. Acta Linguistica Hafniensia 33: 7–18.  DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2002 Danish [Languages of the World 382]. Munich: Lincom.Google Scholar
Kjærbæk, L.
2013 Tilegnelse af bøjningsmorfologi: En undersøgelse af substantivernes pluralisbøjning hos normaltudviklede danske børn i alderen 0–10 år (The Acquisition of Inflectional Morphology: A Study of Noun Plural Inflection in Typically Developing Danish Children in the Ages of 0–10 Years). PhD dissertation, University of Southern Denmark.Google Scholar
MacWhinney, B.
2000a The CHILDES Project: Tools for Analyzing Talk, Vol. 1: Transcription Format and Programs. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.Google Scholar
2000b The CHILDES Project: Tools for Analyzing Talk, Vol. 2: The Database. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.Google Scholar
Madsen, T. O., Basbøll, H. & Lambertsen, C.
2002 OLAM – et semiautomatisk morfologisk og lydstrukturelt kodningssystem for dansk (OLAM – a semiautomatic morphological and phonological coding system for Danish). Odense Working Papers in Language and Communication 24: 43–56.Google Scholar
McCarthy, M. J
1991 Morphology. In The Linguistics Encyclopedia, K. Malmkjær (ed.), 314–324. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Plunkett, K.
1985 Preliminary Approaches to Language Development. Aarhus: Aarhus University Press.Google Scholar
1986 Learning strategies in two Danish children’s language development. Scandinavian Journal of Psychology 27: 64–73.  DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Plunkett, K. & Strömqvist, S.
1992 The Acquisition of Scandinavian Languages. In The Crosslinguistic Study of Language Acquisition, Vol. 3, D. I. Slobin (ed), 457–556. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.Google Scholar
Scalise, S. & Bisetto, A.
2011[2009] The classification of compounds. In The Oxford Handbook of Compounding, R. Lieber & P. Štekauer (eds), 34–53. Oxford: OUP.Google Scholar
Tribushinina, E., Voeikova, M. D. & Noccetti, S.
(eds) 2015 Semantics and Morphology of Early Adjectives in First Language Acquisition. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars.Google Scholar
Wehberg, S., Vach, W., Bleses, D., Thomsen, P., Madsen, T. O. & Basbøll, H.
2008 Girls talk about dolls and boys about cars? Analyses of group and individual variation in Danish children’s first words. First Language 28(1): 71–85.  DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cited by (1)

Cited by 1 other publications

Kjærbæk, Laila & Hans Basbøll
2021. Chapter 4. Emergence and early development of derivatives in Danish child language. In The Acquisition of Derivational Morphology [Language Acquisition and Language Disorders, 66], ► pp. 86 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 26 june 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.