Danish directional adverbs: ways of profiling a motion event

Danish directional adverbs (DDA) (for instance op ’up’, ned ’down’, and ud ’out’) are characterized by an important special feature as satellites – they have different forms: a zero-form (ud-Ø), a form with a derivative e-suffix (ud-e), and a third form with a prepositional ad-suffix (‘ wards’). In this study it is argued that the forms can be described and explained as different ways of profiling a dynamic motion event in a basic path event frame. This analysis is supported by several, strong, linguistically coded conceptual constraints in the use of DDAs in the construction of motion events in Danish found in different corpora, especially constraints regarding the semantics of the verb. However, a great deal of variation is found in specific uses of DDAs, and the question of how to integrate this variation into the description is also briefly addressed, exploring the possibility of combining cognitive linguistics with an instructional semantics.