Constructional Approaches to Nordic Languages

This chapter presents a corpus-based investigation of Norwegian negative-with-minimizer constructions (e.g. ikke forstå en tøddel ‘not understand an umlaut’). The results from collexeme analyses suggest that even though many minimizers are strongly associated with a small set of verbs, indicating high idiomaticity, the combination of these minimizers with semantically mismatching verbs (e.g. ikke bry seg en tøddel ‘not care an umlaut’) is also used. There is no obvious evidence for pragmatic amb