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Article published In:
Historical Germanic morphosyntax
Edited by Stephen Laker and John Ole Askedal
[NOWELE 74:2] 2021
► pp. 278–307

From case to topology

Changes in the Late Middle Danish case system and the reasons for them

| University of Copenhagen

The Scanian dialect of Middle Danish underwent a range of changes and reductions in its case system. I argue that these changes were caused neither by phonological developments nor by language contact as often assumed, but by multiple processes of grammaticalisation. The present paper focuses on one of these factors: that the relatively predictable constituent order within the Middle Danish noun phrase made case marking redundant in its function of marking noun-phrase internal agreement between head and modifier(s). This redundancy caused the case system to undergo a regrammation where the indexical sign relations changed so that the expression of morphological case no longer indicated this noun-phrase-internal agreement, leaving only topology (as well as morphologically marked number and gender agreement) as markers of this type of agreement. This factor contributed to the subsequent degrammation of the entire case system.

Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.The case system of Middle Danish (Scanian)
    • 2.1Skånske Lov ‘Scanian Law’
    • 2.2Sjælens Trøst
      • 2.2.1The traditional system
      • 2.2.2Case marking on adjectives and determiners only
      • 2.2.3No case marking in nominal phrases
      • 2.2.4Mixed systems
    • 2.3Søndagsevangelier
    • 2.4Summary of the systems
  • 3.Reasons for the systemic changes
    • 3.1Traditional explanations
      • 3.1.1Reductive phonological changes
      • 3.1.2Influence from Low German
    • 3.2Grammaticalisation
    • 3.3Redundancy in noun-phrase-internal agreement
      • 3.3.1Noun-phrase-internal agreement
      • 3.3.2Noun-phrase internal topology
      • 3.3.3Grammatical sign relations and redundancy
    • 3.4Principle of markedness agreement
  • 4.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 18 November 2021
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/nowele.00059.han
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