Chapter 8. Phraseology in flux

Today, single-word lexical borrowings are merely the tip of the iceberg of English impact. Thus, the notion of Anglicism should encompass all language features either adopted from English, adapted from English, or inspired by English, used in intralingual communication in another language. This article focuses on the subterranean impact of English as expressed through the morpho­syntactic calques found in contemporary Danish, a language influenced until the 20th century mainly by German lexis and phraseology. The linguistic market shares of near-synonymous expressions were measured in Danish text corpora at 5-year intervals between 1990 and 2010. It was found that established Danish expressions tend to lose ground, while expressions based on English models typically gain popularity – a development hitherto lacking empirical documentation.

Published online: 22 August 2012
https://doi.org/10.1075/z.174.13got