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In:Pragmatic Markers and Peripheries
Edited by Daniël Van Olmen and Jolanta Šinkūnienė
[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 325] 2021
► pp. 385–414

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Chapter 14
The Norwegian tag da in comparison to English then

 | Norwegian University of Science and Technology
 | Freie Universität Berlin
Published online: 13 October 2021
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.325.14bor
Abstract
The Norwegian tag da and the English tag then have most likely developed from a common historical origin through the process of semantic bleaching and they have many overlapping functions today. This has led some researchers to claim that the two expressions have one and the same procedural semantics. Based on authentic corpus data on da and a translation study, we argue that the tags da and then cannot have the same meaning. We propose a semantic and pragmatic analysis of the Norwegian tag da that predicts its many functions and we explain how da differs from the English tag then.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Existing accounts of the Norwegian tag da
  • 3.Similarities between Norwegian da and English then
  • 4.The tags da and then in translation
  • 5.Uses of the Norwegian tag da not found for the English tag then
    • 5.1A second tag da2
    • 5.2Relationships between da1, da2 and the English tag then
  • 6.The tag da and its connection to pronominal right-dislocation in Norwegian
  • 7.Conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • Abbreviations
  • Corpora
  • References
References (46)
Corpora
NoTa-Oslo: Norwegian Speech Corpus – the Oslo part. The Text Laboratory. Department of Linguistics and Scandinavian Studies, University of Oslo. [URL]
Oslo Corpus of Tagged Norwegian Texts, bokmål and nynorsk – the bokmål corpus. The Text Laboratory. Department of Linguistics and Scandinavian Studies, University of Oslo. [URL]
The Oslo Multilingual Corpus (1999–2008). The Faculty of Humanities, University of Oslo. [URL]
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