[Ads-l] Scandinavian topicalization is very flexible

Andy Bach afbach at GMAIL.COM
Fri Dec 13 21:00:59 UTC 2019


Do the Scandinavians have conjugations akin to Latin, where the order is
more flexible due the noun/verb matches (or whatever it is in Latin -
declension or something?)?

On Thu, Dec 12, 2019 at 8:51 PM Mark Mandel <markamandel at gmail.com> wrote:

> *Scandinavians' little linguistic hat trick*
>
> 2019-12-12.1545 UTC±
>
> <https://phys.org/news/2019-12-scandinavians-linguistic-hat.html>
>
> *Norwegian University of Science and Technology*
>
> Linguist Dave Kush at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology's
> Department of Language and Literature has been studying a phenomenon in
> which Norwegian, Swedish and Danish stand out.
>
> This language peculiarity has to do with the order of words, or the syntax.
> The basic point of the study is to better understand the grammatical
> building blocks in our brain.
>
> Moving the most important word to the beginning of a sentence
> <https://phys.org/tags/sentence/> is called topicalization. The first word
> acts as a "heading" for the rest of the sentence.
>
> "Other languages also use topicalization, but the Scandinavians have
> developed topicalization into an art. The keyword can be retrieved from a
> relative clause and placed at beginning of the sentence, even when the
> context is a distance away. The connection—the interpretation of the first
> word—comes later in the sentence," says Dave Kush.
>
>
> * Click link for article*
>
> Mark Mandel
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>


-- 

a

Andy Bach,
afbach at gmail.com
608 658-1890 cell
608 261-5738 wk

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org



More information about the Ads-l mailing list