The grammar of giants: late-stage debonding of kæmpe 'giant' in Danish

It is a common process of language change for free morphemes to become bound morphemes, but the inverse process (termed ‘debonding’ by Norde 2009) is much rarer. Previous studies have found that lexemes with the original meaning ‘giant’ (German Riesen, Dutch reuze) have historically grammaticalized as prefixes, and subsequently debonded into free morphemes with the same bleached meaning as the prefixes (Van Goethem & Hiligsmann 2014; Norde & Van Goethem 2014). Using a synchronic corpus of written Danish (KorpusDK), this paper shows that the Danish word kæmpe, originally ‘giant’, is in the late stages of a similar process of debonding. By investigating the morphological and syntactic patterning of kæmpe, the paper shows that kæmpe has indeed debonded, and occurs as a free-standing semantically bleached adjective, but that it does not yet exhibit fully prototypical adjectival behavior. All three functions of kæmpe remain in use: a noun with the specific meaning ‘giant’, a semantically bleached prefix, and a corresponding semantically bleached adjective. This would argue against an account relying on abrupt category change, and it is proposed that kæmpe has reached its current status through gradual analogy-driven change.Descriptive and Comparative Linguistic

Analyzing time-varying spectral characteristics of speech with function-on-scalar regression

The acoustic characteristics of noise from fricatives and stop releases are difficult to analyze. The spectral characteristics of such noise are multi-dimensional, and popular methods for analyzing them typically rely on reducing this complex information to one or a few discrete numbers, such as spectral moments or coefficients of discrete cosine transformations. In this paper, I propose using function-on-scalar regression models as a method for analyzing and mass-comparing spectra with minimal reduction of the complexity in the signal. The method is further useful for analyzing how spectra change as a function of time. The usefulness of this method is demonstrated with a corpus analysis of Danish aspirated stop releases, using the DanPASS corpus. The analysis finds that /t/ releases are invariably affricated; /k/ releases are highly affected by coarticulatory context; and /p/ releases are almost always dominated by aspiration in the latter half of the release, but are affricated in the first half in certain contexts.Theoretical and Experimental LinguisticsDescriptive and Comparative Linguistic

Stop! Hey, what's that sound?: the representation and realization of Danish stops

This dissertation investigates the phonetic and phonological characteristics of Danish stop consonants, with particular focus on their diachronic origin and synchronic variation. Using data-oriented and statistical methods, it fills empirical gaps in phonetic research on Danish stops and in doing so contributes to our understanding of the overall sound system of the language.The dissertation reports the results of a number of studies which combine spontaneous speech corpora with state-of-the-art techniques in statistical modeling. Topics considered include intervocalic voicing, which is shown to be rare in all stops and in almost all phonetic contexts, and affrication of aspirated stop releases, which is shown to be strongly dependent on place of articulation. The dissertation also investigates a range of phonetic parameters in a legacy corpus of traditional varieties of Jutland Danish, with the results showing systematic regional variation even in minute acoustic details.Theoretical and Experimental Linguistic

En alternativ, fonetisk baseret fonemanalyse af det danske konsonantsystem

Descriptive and Comparative LinguisticsTheoretical and Experimental Linguistic

A phonetically-based phoneme analysis of the Danish consonant system. (Marie Skłodowska-Curie Action. Project: What makes the Danish sound system so difficult for non-native learners? Acronym: LxDP’)

The traditional phoneme analysis of the Danish consonant inventory links onset and coda consonants on the basis of historical alternations and morphologically conditioned alternations within a small subset of the Danish lexicon. This traditional analysis proposes a system resulting in a large number of neutralizations that cannot be dissolved, and in which allophones of the same phoneme lack shared phonetic content. We argue that the system proposed by the traditional analysis is impossible to learn from the language input, which renders the analysis an implausible description of the Danish consonant system. On the basis of theoretical discussions, we offer an alternative phoneme analysis, which we believe to be learnable from the data available in the language input. Our analysis is based on insights from Natural Phonology and Bidirectional Phonetics and Phonology. We propose a system without undissolvable neutralizations, with shared phonetic content between allophones of the same phoneme, and without the need to rely on alternations that children are unlikely to learn in early childhood.894936Theoretical and Experimental Linguistic

The rarity of intervocalic voicing of stops in Danish spontaneous speech

Previous studies of the phonetics of Danish stops have neglected closure voicing. Danish is an aspiration language, but the aspirated stops /p t k/ are produced with shorter closure duration and less articulatory effort than the unaspirated stops /b d ɡ/. Furthermore, all Danish stops are characterized by some degree of glottal spreading during the closure. In this study, we use a corpus of Danish spontaneous speech (DanPASS) to investigate the intervocalic voicing—its distribution across the two laryngeal categories, whether it patterns as a lenition phenomenon, and whether the aerodynamic environment predicts its distribution. We find that intervocalic voicing is not the norm for either set of stops and is particularly rare in /p t k/. Voiced tokens are mostly found in environments associated with lenition. We suggest that the glottal spreading gesture found in all Danish stops is a phonological mechanism blocking voicing, which is probabilistically lost in spontaneous speech. This predicts our results better than relying on laryngeal features like [voice] or [spread glottis]. The study fills a gap in our knowledge of Danish phonetics and phonology, and is also one of the most extensive corpus studies of intervocalic stop voicing in an ‘aspiration language.’Theoretical and Experimental LinguisticsDescriptive and Comparative Linguistic

Stop! Hey, what's that sound?: the representation and realization of Danish stops

This dissertation investigates the phonetic and phonological characteristics of Danish stop consonants, with particular focus on their diachronic origin and synchronic variation. Using data-oriented and statistical methods, it fills empirical gaps in phonetic research on Danish stops and in doing so contributes to our understanding of the overall sound system of the language.The dissertation reports the results of a number of studies which combine spontaneous speech corpora with state-of-the-art techniques in statistical modeling. Topics considered include intervocalic voicing, which is shown to be rare in all stops and in almost all phonetic contexts, and affrication of aspirated stop releases, which is shown to be strongly dependent on place of articulation. The dissertation also investigates a range of phonetic parameters in a legacy corpus of traditional varieties of Jutland Danish, with the results showing systematic regional variation even in minute acoustic details.</p

Effectiveness of Transdiagnostic Cognitive-Behavioral Psychotherapy Compared With Management as Usual for Youth With Common Mental Health Problems: A Randomized Clinical Trial.

Behavioral therapy and cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) programs targeting a single class of problems have not been widely implemented. The population of youths with common mental health problems is markedly undertreated. To determine the effectiveness of a new transdiagnostic CBT program (Mind My Mind [MMM]) compared with management as usual (MAU) in youths with emotional and behavioral problems below the threshold for referral to mental health care. This pragmatic, multisite, randomized clinical trial of MMM vs MAU was conducted from September 7, 2017, to August 28, 2019, including 8 weeks of postintervention follow-up, in 4 municipalities in Denmark. Consecutive help-seeking youths were randomized (1:1) to the MMM or the MAU group. Main inclusion criteria were age 6 to 16 years and anxiety, depressive symptoms, and/or behavioral disturbances as a primary problem. Data were analyzed from August 12 to October 25, 2019. The MMM intervention consisted of 9 to 13 weekly, individually adapted sessions of manualized CBT delivered by local psychologists. The MAU group received 2 care coordination visits to enhance usual care. The primary outcome was change in mental health problems reported by parents at week 18, using the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ) Impact scale (range, 0-10 points, with higher scores indicating greater severity of distress and impairment). Primary and secondary outcomes were assessed in the intention-to-treat population at week 18. Maintenance effects were assessed at week 26. A total of 396 youths (mean [SD] age, 10.3 [2.4] years; 206 [52.0%] boys) were randomized to MMM (n = 197) or MAU (n = 199), with primary outcome data available in 177 (89.8%) and 167 (83.9%), respectively, at 18 weeks. The SDQ Impact score decreased by 2.34 points with MMM and 1.23 with MAU, from initial scores of 4.12 and 4.21, respectively (between-group difference, 1.10 [95% CI, 0.75-1.45]; P &lt; .001; Cohen d = 0.60). Number of responders (≥1-point reduction in SDQ Impact score) was greater with MMM than with MAU (144 of 197 [73.1%] vs 93 of 199 [46.7%]; number needed to treat, 4 [95% CI, 3-6]). Secondary outcomes indicated statistically significant benefits in parent-reported changes of anxiety, depressive symptoms, daily functioning, school attendance, and the principal problem. All benefits were maintained at week 26 except for school attendance. In this randomized clinical trial, the scalable transdiagnostic cognitive-behavioral intervention MMM outperformed MAU in a community setting on multiple, clinically relevant domains in youth with emotional and behavioral problems. ClinicalTrials.gov Identifier: NCT03535805