Exclamative clauses with "hvor", "hvilken" and "sikke" in Danish : Insubordination and phrasal discontinuity

Abstract

In this study, I describe exclamative constructions with certain question words in Danish, with a focus on their word order, and relate this to their status as potentially insubordinate constructions. Previous studies of exclamatives have studied semantic aspects of such clauses, while recent studies focus on syntactic properties. Exclamatives have also been considered an instance of insubordination (Heine et al. 2020). Danish is interesting in this aspect because some of the exclamative markers have peculiar, but known diachronic origins, that might shed light on some of the claims and questions made in previous literature. This article will first specify the possible exclamatives based on which question word is used, and then describe the syntactic patterns (primarily word order) used with hvor ‘how’, hvilken ‘which’ and sikke ‘what a’ occurring in exclamative constructions. In section 2, I explain central concepts, previous descriptions, and perspectives on the relationship between exclamative constructions and other constructions, such as questions and insubordinate constructions. In section 3, I provide information on the availability of different sentence types relevant for exclamatives in Danish and discuss the distribution of question words and other features. In section 4, I analyze the possible word orders and syntactic contexts that exclamatives with hvor, sikke and hvilken occur in based on corpus data. In section 5, I discuss the implications that the Danish constructions have for theories about the grammaticalization and structuring of exclamative constructions. Section 6 is the conclusion, followed by an epilogue with reflections and interactional perspectives.