Abstract
At least some old Danish place-name endings are productive in con-temporary Danish, and serve to mark that the word of which they form part is the name of a place. This paper reports the results of a letter detection test which supports the hypothesis that at least some of these endings are grammatical morphemes. Specifically, the letter e was found to be missed significantly more often in place-name endings than in contrast strings that can be assumed to be lexical. This result mirrors the well-established observation that more letters tend to be missed in grammatical than in lexical signs. The claim that at least some old place-name endings are grammatical morphemes entails that they must have undergone grammaticalization, either in the form of delexicalization or in the form of so-called secretion.
Original language | Danish |
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Journal | Ny Forskning i Grammatik |
Volume | 29 |
Pages (from-to) | 4-27 |
Number of pages | 23 |
ISSN | 1902-1291 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 24 Oct 2022 |