Fra Slagelse til Fjollerup: Er stednavneefterled grammatiske tegn?

Abstract

At least some old Danish place-name endings are productive in contemporary Danish, and serve to mark that the word of which they form part is the name of a place. This paper reports the results of a letter detection test which supports the hypothesis that at least some of these endings are grammatical morphemes. Specifically, the letter e was found to be missed significantly more often in place-name endings than in contrast strings that can be assumed to be lexical. This result mirrors the well-established observation that more letters tend to be missed in grammatical than in lexical signs. The claim that at least some old place-name endings are grammatical morphemes entails that they must have undergone grammaticalization, either in the form of delexicalization or in the form of so-called secretion.