chapter 14 Supine in Danish and Swedish

14.1 Introduction

This chapter examines the supine form of the verb in the two closely related languages, Danish and Swedish, and argues that there are fundamental differ- ences in the semiotic organisation of the two forms. This may seem surprising as the supine forms and their functions appear – prima facie – strikingly simi- lar, cf. (114).

(114) Danish: hun har køb-t bogen Swedish: hon har köp-t boken she has buy-sup the.book ‘she has bought the book’

Despite the apparent similarities, however, the analyses below will demon- strate that the two supines are far from identical. In the preceding chapter, the analysis of the supine and the perfect parti- ciple in Danish showed how these two nonfinites are designed for contribution of the verb stem content to different contexts, and the choice between them is an opposition between distinct ways of pointing out functional contexts. In particular, the supine has a number of different functions, and though all of these functions may be described as verbal, it is only through the employment of the supine in a specific syntactic construction that the semantics of the verb form, such as its argument assignment, is configured. As noted in section 13.8, the contextual specification of the supine is an aspect of the ‘relativity’ of the -t forms, and the dependence on context means that the supine form signals that one must “look elsewhere” for further semantic determination. In itself, the supine morpheme appears to provide very little semantics. The participle functions as an adjective, and the distinguishing participle morpheme, the XII of paradigm articulation, specifies the relative nonfinite as being, functionally, an adjective. The supine has verbal function, but that in itself is not a very substantial description of the semantics of the supine morpheme, i.e. the content associated with the ∅II, the absence of paradigm articulation. Saying that the supine is a verb form with verbal function may appear close to tautological. The question is what the content of the supine morpheme is apart from this signalling of verbal, rather than adjectival,

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���6 | doi ��.��63/9789004321830_019 Supine in Danish and Swedish 433 function. This problem – of how to determine the meaning of the supine morpheme – was presented in section 1.3. The supine’s dependence on its syn- tactic context was noted in section 1.3, and it was this “pointing” of the supine to the context that prompted the examination of the concept of indexicality in chapter 3. This semiotic examination will now provide the theoretical tools for analysing indexicality in the case of the Danish supine. In this chapter, I compare the Danish and Swedish supine and highlight the particular profile of the verb form in the two languages in contrast to one another.1 I analyse the supine form of the verb in the two languages – or more precisely the supine as a grammatical sign, a lexeme-independent morpholog- ical choice that combines with the verb stem – and describe the content of the supine on the basis of its syntactic contexts and the semantic contribution of the supine to the constructions of which it forms part. As shown in chapter 13, the case of the supine provides a good demonstration of the cooperation between morphology and syntax, as a fact of the organisation of languages as well as an important requirement of the description of a morphological option. Analysis of this cooperation is just as essential in a comparison of the supine in the two languages. The supine in Danish and Swedish is a particu- larly interesting case of different semiotic aspects of coded content, and I shall use the description of the supine to elaborate on the distinction between sym- bolic and indexical content and the need for distinguishing between the two and describing how they cooperate. I argue that in the supine constructions the allocation of symbolic and indexical function is almost reversed between Danish and Swedish. This shows the necessity of language-specific analysis. The discrepancies between Danish and Swedish revealed by the comparison demonstrate that even closely related languages cannot be assumed to be morphologically and syntactically coded and structured in the same way; one must subject each individual language to analysis on the terms dictated by that language in its own right. The precise description of the actual coded content of the supine cannot be reached without a careful analysis of the interaction between verbs in the supine and their syntactic context, especially the system of auxiliary verbs, through which it becomes clear what may be regarded as the contribution of the supine itself and what should be regarded as a con- tribution of other elements in the syntactic construction to which the supine may point. The outline of the chapter is as follows. In section 14.2, I describe and com- pare the morphology of the two supine forms, and in section 14.3, I describe

1 An earlier version of this study of the Danish and Swedish supine is presented in Nielsen (2012b).