Cover not available

In:Constructional Approaches to Nordic Languages
Edited by Evie Coussé, Steffen Höder, Benjamin Lyngfelt and Julia Prentice
[Constructional Approaches to Language 37] 2023
► pp. 114–144

Get fulltext from our e-platform
JBE logo with link
PDF logo with download linkDownload Book PDF
EPUB logo with download linkDownload Book EPUB
authorization required

Chapter 5
Meaning integration in pseudocoordination

 | University of Bergen
Published online: 7 November 2023
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/cal.37.05kin
Abstract
Pseudocoordination in Scandinavian languages looks like VP coordination but has a number of characteristics which have led some researchers to regard it as not representing coordination. Research on pseudocoordination has often focused on grammaticalization of the first verb. But most researchers have concluded that very few such verbs actually exhibit any notable degree of grammaticalization. This indicates that grammaticalization is secondary, and it and calls for an improved understanding of non-grammaticalized pseudocoordination – in itself and as a precursor to grammaticalization. This article argues that pseudocoordination represents VP coordination with additional semantic integration: facilitation and backgrounding.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Background
    • 2.1PC characteristics
    • 2.2PC subschemas and the paradigm of V1s
    • 2.3Most V1s are fully lexical
  • 3.PC is VP coordination
    • 3.1The constructional analysis of coordination
    • 3.2Explaining C1 and C2: The coordinands in PC are VPs
    • 3.3One step up: The VP coordination construction
  • 4.Meaning integration in PC
    • 4.1Comparison with serial verb constructions
    • 4.2Facilitation is at the core of PC
    • 4.3Explaining C3 concerning coordinators and focus adverbs
    • 4.4Explaining C4: Fixed coordinand order
    • 4.5Explaining C5 concerning negation and other sentence adverbials
    • 4.6Explaining C6: Identical verb inflections
    • 4.7Explaining C7: Backgrounding and filler–gap asymmetry
    • 4.8Desemanticization and grammaticalization rest on backgrounding
  • 5.Concluding discussion
  • Notes
  • References
References (49)
References
Ahlberg, M., Andersson, P., Forsberg, M., & Tahmasebi, N. (2015). A case study on supervised classification of Swedish pseudo-coordination. 20th Nordic Conference of Computational Linguistics (NODALIDA 2015), NEALT Proceedings Series, 23, 11–19.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Andersson, P., & Blensenius, K. (2018). En historisk studie av pseudosamordning: konstruktionen gå och V i svenskan. Studier i svensk språkhistoria, 14, 80–101.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Barðdal, J., & Gildea, S. (2015). Diachronic Construction Grammar: Epistemological context, basic assumptions and historical implications. In J. Barðdal, E. Smirnova, L. Sommerer & S. Gildea (Eds.), Diachronic Construction Grammar (pp. 1–49). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Blensenius, K. (2013). En pluraktionell progressivmarkör? Hålla på att jämförd med hålla på och. Språk och Stil, 23, 175–204.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Bohnemeyer, J. (1998). Time relations in discourse. Evidence from a comparative approach to Yukatek Maya. Dissertation. Katholieke Universiteit Brabant.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Boland, J. H. G. (2006). Aspect, tense and modality: Theory, typology, acquisition. Dissertation. Universiteit van Amsterdam.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Börjars, K., & Vincent, N. (2005). Position vs. function in Scandinavian presentational constructions. In M. Butt & T. H. King (Eds.), Proceedings of LFG05 (no pagination). Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Chaves, R. (2007). Coordinate structures. Constraint-based syntax-semantics processing. Dissertation. Universidade de Lisboa.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Croft, W. (2001). Radical Construction Grammar. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
(2003). Lexical rules vs. constructions. A false dichotomy. In H. Cuyckens, T. Berg, R. Dirven & K. Panther (Eds.), Motivation in language. Studies in honor of Günter Radden (pp. 49–68). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
de Vos, M. A. (2005). The syntax of verbal pseudo-coordination in English and Afrikaans. Dissertation. Universiteit Leiden.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Dyvik, H., Meurer, P., Rosén, V., De Smedt, K., Haugereid, P., Losnegaard, G. S., Lyse, G. I., & Thunes, M. (2016). NorGramBank: A ‘Deep’ Treebank for Norwegian. In N. Calzolari, K. Choukri, T. Declerck, M. Grobelnik, B. Maegaard, J. Mariani, A. Moreno, J. Odijk & S. Piperidis (Eds.), Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC’16) (pp. 3555–3562). Portorož: ELRA.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Ekberg, L. (1993). Verbet ta i metaforisk och grammatikaliserad användning. Språk och Stil, 3, 105–139.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Faarlund, J. T., Lie, S., & Vannebo, K. I. (1997). Norsk referansegrammatikk. Oslo: Universitetsforlaget.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Fjeld, R. V., Nøklestad, A., & Hagen, K. (2020). Leksikografisk bokmålskorpus (LBK) – bakgrunn og bruk. In J. B. Johannessen & K. Hagen (Eds.), Leksikografi og korpus. En hyllest til Ruth Vatvedt Fjeld, Oslo Studies in Language, 11, 47–59. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Goldberg, A. (2013). Constructionist approaches. In T. Hoffmann & G. Trousdale (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of Construction Grammar (pp. 15–31). Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Hansen, E., & Heltoft, L. (2011). Grammatik over det danske sprog. Copenhagen: Det Danske Sprog‑ og Litteraturselskab.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Haspelmath, M. (2007). Coordination. In T. Shopen (Ed.), Language typology and syntactic description, vol. 2: Complex constructions (pp. 1–51). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
(2016). The Serial Verb Construction: Comparative concept and cross-linguistic generalizations. Language and Linguistics, 17, 291–319.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Heine, B., & Kuteva, T. (2002). World lexicon of grammaticalization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Heltoft, L. (2005). Topologi som tegnsystem. In E. Engberg-Pedersen, M. Fortescue, P. Harder, L. Heltoft, M. Herslund & L. Falster Jakobsen, Dansk funktionel lingvistik (pp. 112–131). Copenhagen & Roskilde: Københavns Universitet, Handelshøjskolen i København & Roskilde Universitetscenter.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Hesse, A. (2009). Zur Grammatikalisierung der Pseudokoordination. Tübingen: A. Francke.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Kinn, T. (2001). Pseudopartitives in Norwegian. Dissertation. Universitetet i Bergen.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
(2014). Verbalt presens partisipp. Norsk Lingvistisk Tidsskrift, 32, 62–99.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
(2017). Den trassige verbforma: presens partisipp og kongruensproblem i pseudokoordinasjon. In Z. S. Hansen, A. Johansen, H. P. Petersen & L. Reinert (Eds.), Bók Jógvan (pp. 213–230). Tórshavn: Fróðskapur. Faroe University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
(2018). Pseudocoordination in Norwegian. Degrees of grammaticalization and constructional variants. In E. Coussé, P. Andersson & J. Olofsson (Eds.), Grammaticalization meets Construction Grammar (pp. 75–106). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
(2019). Framveksten av pseudokoordinasjon med drive. Norsk Lingvistisk Tidsskrift, 37, 207–236.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Kinn, T., Blensenius, K., & Andersson, P. (2018). Posture, location, and activity in Mainland Scandinavian pseudocoordinations. CogniTextes. [URL]. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Klein, W. (1994). Time in language. London: Routledge.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Kuteva, T. (2001). Auxiliation. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Kvist Darnell, U. (2008). Pseudosamordningar i svenska: särskilt sådana med verben sitta, ligga och stå. Dissertation. Stockholms universitet.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Lakoff, G. (1986). Frame semantic control of the coordinate structure constraint. Chicago Linguistic Society, 22, 152–167.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Langacker, R. W. (1987). Foundations of Cognitive Grammar, vol. 1: Theoretical prerequisites. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
(1991). Foundations of Cognitive Grammar, vol. 2: Descriptive application. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Lødrup, H. (2002). The syntactic structures of Norwegian pseudocoordinations. Studia Linguistica, 56, 121–143. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
(2014a). There is no reanalysis in Norwegian pseudocoordinations (except when there is). In H. P. Helland & C. M. Salvesen (Eds.), Affaire(s) de grammaire (pp. 43–65). Oslo: Novus.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
(2014b). How can a verb agree with a verb? Reanalysis and pseudocoordination in Norwegian. In M. Butt & T. H. King (Eds.), Proceedings of LFG14 (pp. 367–386). Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
(2017). Norwegian pseudocoordination with the verb drive ‘carry on’: Control, raising, grammaticalization. In M. Butt & T. H. King (Eds.), Proceedings of LFG17 (pp. 264–284). Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
(2019). Pseudocoordination with posture verbs in Mainland Scandinavian: A grammaticalized progressive construction? Nordic Journal of Linguistics, 42, 87–110. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Nielsen, P. J. (2011). Kongruenskonstruktion i dansk. Oslo: Novus.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Ross, D. (2016). Between coordination and subordination: Typological, structural and diachronic perspectives on pseudocoordination. In F. Pratas, S. Pereira & C. Pinto (Eds.), Coordination and subordination (pp. 209–243). Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Teleman, U., Hellberg, S., & Andersson, E. (1999). Svenska Akademiens grammatik. Stockholm: Svenska Akademien.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Tonne, I. (2001). Progressives in Norwegian and the theory of aspectuality. Dissertation. Universitetet i Oslo.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Traugott, E. C., & Trousdale, G. (2013). Constructionalization and constructional changes. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Vannebo, K. I. (1969). Aksjonsart i norsk. Oslo: Universitetsforlaget.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
(2003). Ta og ro deg ned noen hakk: On pseudocoordination with the verb ta ‘take’ in a grammaticalization perspective. Nordic Journal of Linguistics, 26, 165–193. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Wierzbicka, A. (1980). Lingua mentalis: The semantics of natural language. Sydney: Academic Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Wiklund, A.-L. (2007). The syntax of tenselessness. Berlin: de Gruyter. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Cited by (2)

Cited by two other publications

Carlucci, Alessandro & Jerzy Nykiel
2025. Introduction. In The Progressive Revisited [Studies in Language Companion Series, 236], ► pp. 1 ff. DOI logo
Nykiel, Jerzy
2025. Does English have grammaticalized progressive pseudo-coordination?. In The Progressive Revisited [Studies in Language Companion Series, 236], ► pp. 159 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 5 december 2025. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.

Mobile Menu Logo with link to supplementary files background Layer 1 prag Twitter_Logo_Blue