Paul Diderichsen (16 August 1905,

Copenhagen Copenhagen ( ) is the capital and most populous city of Denmark, with a population of 1.4 million in the Urban area of Copenhagen, urban area. The city is situated on the islands of Zealand and Amager, separated from Malmö, Sweden, by the ...

9 October 1964, Copenhagen) was a Danish

linguist Linguistics is the scientific study of language. The areas of linguistic analysis are syntax (rules governing the structure of sentences), semantics (meaning), Morphology (linguistics), morphology (structure of words), phonetics (speech sounds ...

who is known for his model of sentence structure in Danish which has been widely applied to describe the

syntax In linguistics, syntax ( ) is the study of how words and morphemes combine to form larger units such as phrases and sentences. Central concerns of syntax include word order, grammatical relations, hierarchical sentence structure (constituenc ...

of languages with fixed word order, such as the mainland Scandinavian languages. Diderichsen was professor of Danish at the

University of Copenhagen The University of Copenhagen (, KU) is a public university, public research university in Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark. Founded in 1479, the University of Copenhagen is the second-oldest university in Scandinavia, after Uppsala University. ...

from 1943 until his death.

The Diderichsen Sentence Model

In order to describe the different operations in Danish syntax, Diderichsen developed a model, making use of ordered slots into which different sentence constituents can be inserted. Danish is a so-called V2 language, a language in which the verb is nearly always the second constituent in a wellformed clause, the preverbal slot can be used to insert many different kinds of syntactic elements. The basic model distinguishes a grounding field, a nexus field and a content field. The grounding field contains elements that are moved out of one of the other slots in order to serve as the

theme Theme or themes may refer to: * Theme (Byzantine district), an administrative district in the Byzantine Empire governed by a Strategos * Theme (computing), a custom graphical appearance for certain software. * Theme (linguistics), topic * Theme ( ...

of the sentence. The nexus field contains slots for the finite verb and its arguments and adverbial modifiers. The content field contains the infinite verb, its object and adverbial modifiers.

References

The Diderichsen Sentence Model- a flexible tool in syntactic analysis, by Henrik Jørgensen, Univ. of Århus
*University of Gothenburg (2010, May 31). ''Classic grammar model can be used for computerized parsing''. ScienceDaily. Retrieved June 1, 2010, fro

{{DEFAULTSORT:Diderichsen, Paul Linguists from Denmark Syntacticians Academic staff of the University of Copenhagen 1905 births 1964 deaths 20th-century Danish linguists