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Sikke et ord
Author(s) -
Torben Thrane
Publication year - 2017
Publication title -
hermes
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.759
H-Index - 7
eISSN - 1903-1785
pISSN - 0904-1699
DOI - 10.7146/hjlcb.v14i27.25650
Subject(s) - danish , covert , computer science , syntax , linguistics , simple (philosophy) , natural language processing , syntactic structure , mechanism (biology) , expression (computer science) , artificial intelligence , programming language , philosophy , epistemology
There is an apparently peripheral construction type that falls outside the normally mandatory V2-structure of Danish main clauses, expressions introduced by the emphatic lexical item sikke (plus inflectional variants sikken, sikket). Such expressions defy standard taxonomic descriptions of Danish and pose a challenge to current formal (GB/PP/Minimalist) generalizations about movement operations. This paper aims to give not only a coherent description of such expressions in morphological, syntactic, and semantic terms, but also proposes a simple mechanism for information-sharing between nodes in addition to overt and - especially - covert movement. Given this mechanism it is shown that the description of a number of other and seemingly disparate aspects of Danish syntax follows naturally from the assumption that they are all instantiations of 'breakstructure'.