The perfect participle and the supine in two chronolects of Danish

Resumen

Modern Standard Danish distinguishes between a perfect participle and a supine. The perfect participle is an adnominal non-finite form of the verb, ascribing properties to a referent (as do the prototypical adjectives) and morpho-syntactically agreeing with this referent. The supine is an indeclinable non-finite form of a verb, ending in -t, used as a component in periphrastic verb forms. Outside the attributive position, the perfect participle is used in complement constructions with the copula verbs være ‘be’ and blive ‘be’/‘become’; the supine is used in perfective constructions and periphrastic passives with the auxiliaries have ‘have’, få ‘get’, være ‘be’ and blive ‘be’/‘become’. In Modern Standard Danish, the perfect participle has restricted use (it is the marked member of the paradigm perfect participle vs. supine); the supine has a wider domain of usage (it is the unmarked member of the paradigm). In the nineteenth century, this was different. Back then, the perfect participle was the unmarked form with a wide usage domain, whereas the supine had a more restricted use. This paper presents a study of these verb forms in two corpora representing different chronolects of Danish, one corpus consisting of texts from the nineteenth century, one of texts from Modern Standard Danish.