Endocentrism and analytic naming as communication strategies of the Danish language

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ABSTRACT

This article proposes a correlation between Michael Herslund’s concepts of “endocentric and exocentric languages” and Per Durst-Andersen’s concepts of “hearer-oriented and reality-oriented languages”, correspondingly. The article argues that the Danish syntagmatic tendency to discrete expression of meanings is manifested both in verbal and nominal naming. This syntagmatic tendency is interpreted as a manifestation of an addressee-friendly naming strategy, since it allows the addressee to reconstruct the meaning by referring to a general semantic category. The sections of the article are devoted to the implications of analytic naming as a reflection of the Danish hearer-oriented communication strategy and syntagmatic tendency to discreteness, modularity and distancing in expressing complex meanings. In this regard, the following phenomena are considered: systemic analytical tendencies in the Germanic languages, manifested at different language levels; analytical tendencies in the structural and semantic organization of Danish compounds; the modular nature of Danish verbal compounds and their correlation with analytic complexes.

KEYWORDS:

• Endocentric languages
• hearer-oriented languages
• addressee-friendly naming strategy
• syntagmatic strategies of discreteness and modularity

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.