Orienteringskløvningen - Sætningskløvninger i Ole Kollerøds Min historie

Cleft-constructions in Danish (det var ikke mig der gjorde det – ‘it was not me that did
it’) have been shown to vary in quantity and function between styles and genres. This
study reports the findings of a corpus linguistic study of a corpus of 143 Danish clefts
authored by the working-class Copenhagener Ole Kollerød in his narrative Min historie
(1840). Results show that clefts in this corpus are more frequent (8.8 clefts in 10,000
words) than in edited, normalized written Danish but less frequent than in both formal
and casual spoken Danish. The study also finds a surprisingly high share of adverbial
clefts. I suggest that the distribution is correlated with the genre of everyday narratives.
The adverbial clefts function as a way to disentangle temporal references to ‘real world
time’ from deictic temporal references of the narrative.