Chapter 3. One man’s [ɕœtː] is another man’s [kʰøð̞]

Abstract

The three Continental Scandinavian languages Danish, Norwegian and Swedish are closely related and share a large pool of Interscandinavian cognates, but a variety of phonological differences between the languages can obscure the lexical similarities and make spoken Interscandinavian communication a challenge for untrained listeners. It is therefore advantageous to know about sound correspondences, and applying sound correspondence ‘rules’ is thought to be one of the major strategies in Interscandinavian decoding. How speakers analyse, acquire and utilize such phonological patterns has not been investigated so far, however – neither theoretically nor empirically. Using example correspondences between Danish and Swedish, the chapter illustrates how the acquisition of sound correspondence rules could look like from a Construction Grammar perspective, more precisely, from the perspective of Diasystematic Construction Grammar (Höder, 2018). It models knowledge about sound correspondences as a combination of two language-specific constructions and one cross-linguistic language-unspecific construction capturing the equivalence relation between the two language-specific ones. Besides specific sound correspondence constructions, also the acquisition of more abstract constructions presenting a generalization over several specific correspondences is illustrated. The cognitive plausibility of sound correspondence constructions at different levels of abstraction is discussed against the background of an ongoing debate in the CxG community about higher-order schemas.