PECULIARITIES OF COPULATIVE COMPOUNDS IN THE DANISH LANGUAGE

Abstract

The article deals with copulative compounds that deserve consideration in spite of representing a relatively small group in modern Danish. Being in a kind of opposition to determinative compounds, copulative compounds explicate coordinative relations between components denoting phenomena, things, qualities, properties, or actions, while their lexical meaning is determined equally by the semantics of the two components. Copulative compounds in Danish are characterized by athematic connection of stems, joint or hyphenated spelling (spelling with a slash is also possible), and either equally stressed components or the main stress on the second component with the secondary stress on the first component. Copulative nouns and adjectives are most frequent, while copulative verbs, adverbs, and numerals are few in numbers. The study of the usage of coordinative compounds in the Corpus of the Danish language and in mass-media reveals a tendency of their use not independently, but as the first component of a determinative compound, which demonstrates a “strive” towards this type, prevailing in Danish (mor-datter-forhold, mor-datter-relationer). Many of copulative compounds become “fashionable” and create whole rows by way of analogy, partly under the influence of English. The viability of this model is proved by extensive use of such compounds in pedagogy, psychology, business, advertizing and others as well as by creation of individual-speech compounds according to the model. The study of peculiarities in formation of coordinative compounds helps to build a complete picture of word composition in Danish.