#extraposition

Let's talk about on of my favourite spoken Danish grammar things, extraposition!

In short, extraposition is taking part of a sentence and then placing that part (most commonly a noun phrase) OUTSIDE of the regular structure of the sentence and replacing it with a pronoun.

An example of this could be hunden, den løber hurtigt 'the dog runs fast', where the subject of the sentence hunden is placed on the outskirts of the sentence, being replaced by the pronoun den 'it'.

Looking at this sentence structure as an outsider, it seems weird and unnecessary, but it's really, really common in spoken Danish to the point where I would almost consider it mandatory in informal speech.

Unfortunately there hasn't really been done much research on this specific phenomenon in Danish, but my study buddy and I will be writing our exam for Grammatical theory on it.

Anyway here's some more examples:

min studiekammerat, hen er taget hjem her i weekenden 'my study buddy has gone home for the weekend'

vores hund da jeg var barn, hun hed Freja 'our dog when i was a child was named Freja'

Jane og John, de er allerede taget afsted 'Jane and John have already left'

and so on and so forth :)

This is actually a really good question that I also thought about a while ago when constructing my post on gender neutral pronouns in Danish!

The sentence that made me consider it was a demonstration of how to use the neopronoun høn whose nominative and oblique forms are identical. When going to translate it, I realised that there actually wasn’t a great English equivalent.

What I wrote was: Det er høn den høje med lyst hår, which I ended up translating as ‘They’re the tall one with light hair’. But that’s not very specific, so allow me to come up with some better examples! I am going to use glossing for this, which tumblr’s formatting unfortunately isn’t great for, so I will be using screenshots with image descriptions.

For a starter, ham/hende [xyz]en and ham/hende den [xyz] are usually used when describing to a conversation partner a person or object that they may not be super familiar with. I.e. if I were to describe Keira Knightley to my dad I might describe her as the actor in Pirates of The Carribean; hende skuespilleren fra Pirates of the Carribean. Likewise, if I in the original example was pointing out a friend who uses høn pronouns (which is not a friend I have, but that’s besides the point) in a crowd to another friend, who don’t know them very well and therefore need physical pointers so identify them, I could say høn den høje etc.

As for when to use -en/-et vs. den/det, it’s the usual rules for adjectives. I cannot remember if I’ve ever made a post about that, but if I haven’t I might look into it soon. Now for some more in-depth examples!

Let’s use ham/hende [xyz]en for simplicity. Since I already used that example, lets go with this sentence: Du kender da Keira Knightley; hende skuespilleren fra Pirates of the Caribbean.

First I want to bring into focus the order and function of the phrases here. I apologise if my terminology is a little off, because I literally have never learned some of this in English.

So:

[Image description: A screenshot of an analysis of the example sentence, designating ‘du’ as a noun phrase and the subject, ‘kender’ as a verb phrase and the predicate, ‘da’ as an adverbial phrase, ‘Keira Knightley’ as a noun phrase and the direct object, and ‘hende skuespilleren et cetera’ as a noun phrase and the object complement. End image description]

or further simplified:

[Image description: Another screenshot, now with the a simpler sentence ‘det er hende skuespilleren et cetera’. ‘Det’ is marked as a noun phrase and subject, ‘er’ as a verb phrase and predicate, and ‘hende skuespilleren et cetera’ as a noun phrase and subject complement. End image description]

So what I’m really trying to get at here is that ham/hende [xyz]en/den [xyz] has an attributive function and typically acts as a complement in a sentence. It may occur alone as a means of further elaborating something about a person or object if an interlocutor seems confused by mention of said person/object by name or the like.

Now, lets get to actually translating the above. You may remember that I said I “ended up translating” the example I used in my pronouns post? That’s because there is no good translation. If I were to do a not very detailed glossing of it, it would look like this:

[Image description: A glossing of the example sentence according to the Leipzig glossing rules. Ultimately, the sentence is translated to ‘surely you know Keira Knightley; the actor from Pirates of the Caribbean’. End Image description]

So, to put if it simply, directly translated word-by-word the sentence would end up as You know surely Keira Knightley; her the actor from Pirates of the Caribbean, which is not great – specifically because of the ham/hende [xyz]en/den [xyz] construction (if you ignore the adverb). Likewise, the simpler version would be That is her the actor from Pirates of the Caribbean.

So get this: For the sentence to look just fine in English, all you have to do is remove the pronoun (and fix the adverb, but again: not the point).

The thing that happens in the sentence here is called extraposition. It is, and I cannot stress this enough, EXTREMELY common in spoken Danish to the point where it’s almost mandatory. You could say a sentence without it, but literally no one ever does. While we write it with no problem, Danes are almost incapable of actually saying a sentence that has a 3rd person subject that is not a pronoun without adding an extraposition.

Normal straight-forward Danish word order without getting too much into it is subejct - verb - object, EXCEPT if the subject is 3rd person and not already a pronoun. Then it spoken Danish it almost always becomes extraposition - subject - verb - object.

This ultimately results in sentences like manden elsker hunden ‘the man loves the dog’ and hundene spiser kød ‘the dogs eat meat’ becoming manden han elsker hundene ‘the man he loves the dogs’ and hundene de spiser kød ‘the dogs they eat meat’, moving the noun to the extraposition and positioning the pronoun in place of the subject.

This could also happen to a sentence like du kender da skuespilleren fra Pirates of the Caribbean ‘surely you know the actor from Pirates of the Caribbean’, which would become du kender da ham/hende skuespilleren fra Pirates of the Caribbean ‘surely you know him/her the actor from Pirates of the Caribbean’. So in this case, the nucleus of the NP skuespilleren ‘the actor’ remains in its original position, but an oblique pronoun is added as a sort of extraposition (this is not entirely true, as that’s not really how word order works, but it works as an explanation as to why this happens). The opposite could also happen if the original sentence read (...) ham/hende fra Pirates of the Caribbean ‘(...) him/her from Pirates of the Caribbean’, with an extra skuespilleren ‘the actor being added’. Regardless of whether it is the pronoun or the noun that is added, the pronoun ALWAYS get the first position when it is not in the case of the subject.

I don’t know why this is, since I’ve only ever really learned about moving a noun/pronoun to extraposition and add a pronoun as the subject. However, I suspect it has something to do with of ham/hende [noun] actually having an almost independent function i.e. very clearly as in a sentence like hende Eva, hun er ret sød ‘say, that Eva, she is quite sweet’, so ham/hende [noun] serves the same function as the English construction say, that [noun], especially the that [noun], in which the Danish equivalent uses the pronoun to add a certain amount of definite-ness to the noun. Ultimate, I actually think, that the most accurate translation if hende skuespilleren fra Pirates of the Caribbean would be ‘that actor from Pirates of the Carribean’. I don’t really know, but I think it’s really interesting!

For example, take the sentence, "I saw the light when he opened my eyes."

Can also be said as: "When he opened my eyes, I saw the light."