Indirekte objekt i moderne dansk talesprog: En korpusundersøgelse af frit indirekte objekt

Since the 18th c., the Danish indirect object (IO) has undergone a narrowing of its semantic potential, and Heltoft (2014) claims that free, non-governed IOs (FIOs) are no longer possible in present-day Danish. The paper presents an empirical test of this claim based on data from the LANCHART corpus of spoken Danish. The corpus findings suggest prima facie that the FIO construction is indeed no longer an option. However, the paper shows that the very few FIOs found in the corpus call for an analysis of pragmatic preconditions. It is suggested that the FIO presupposes aspects of regulative speech acts, which are rarely found in the text types of the LANCHART corpus, and the paper points out methodical problems in quantitatively oriented corpus-based assessments of grammatical systems.