At hun tør.: On hyperparadigmatic structures in Danish sentence formation.

Description

A thorough account of the organisation of a language requires that not only relations on the syntagmatic axis, but also on the paradigmatic axis are investigated.

Paradigms are virtual entities in the sense that only one member of a paradigm can be present at any given time. The paradigms are not visible in people's utterances, but they are present in the linguistic choices we make, and they form the potential for variation in speech and writing. Grammatical paradigms are particularly  interesting in that they are obligatory and they form the frame of interpretation for an utterance's meaning.

I have investigated the interplay between a series of paradigms in modern Danish, all related to the meaning domain of modality. In the paper I focus on a couple of the paradigms which are most important for an understanding of sentence formation in Danish.