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Wh-Optatives in Danish: Compositional and Noncompositional Aspects

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 May 2013

Bjarne Ørsnes
Bjarne Ørsnes*
Affiliation:
Copenhagen Business School
*
Copenhagen Business School, Department of International Business Communication, Dalgas Have 15, DK-2000 Frederiksberg, Denmark, [[email protected]]
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Abstract

Danish has an optative taking the form of a wh-clause with embedded word order: Hvem der var rig! lit. ‘Who there were rich!’ with the intended meaning Wish I were rich! Such wh-clauses cannot be used as optatives in German or English (or only marginally so). On the basis of a detailed analysis of the syntax, semantics, and pragmatics of this little-studied phenomenon, this article seeks to explain why a wh-clause with “embedded” word order can be used as an optative. I argue that wh-optatives are compositional in many but not all respects. It is a special construction whose interpretation is determined to a large extent by its grammatical properties but which also has completely idiosyncratic properties. In German and English, such wh-clauses are only potential optatives: They are not used as optatives, but nothing would preclude it.*

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Germanic Linguistics , Volume 25 , Issue 2 , June 2013 , pp. 137 - 192
Copyright
Copyright © Society for Germanic Linguistics 2013 

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