Sune Sønderberg Mortensen

• PhD
• Professor (Assistant) at Roskilde University

This article examines the special political-administrative sense of the word næse ‘nose’ in Danish, designating formal public reprimand. A næse is frequently given through a majority vote in the Danish Parliament to members of the government as a culmination of political controversy over e.g. administrative errors or failure to govern in compliance...

The motivation for questioning questions arose in the research group Language, Culture and Cognition in 2018 when several members were working on material that included questions. In this work, a series of problems appeared, including: How do we classify questions based on their functions? What is the cognitive basis for questions? How do we accoun...

This paper compares the questioning of witnesses and defendants in American and Danish courtroom interaction on the basis of one American and three Danish criminal trials. A total of 780 questions are analysed in terms of their morphosyntactic properties as well as speech act functions. Following a general discussion of courtroom questioning and th...

This study compares the use of interjections by the defence lawyers in an American and a Danish criminal trial during their direct-examination of their clients, i.e. the defendants. Through quantitative and qualitative analyses it is shown that the Danish lawyer uses interjections much more frequently than the American lawyer, and that the interjec...

This special issue of Nordic Journal of Linguistics is dedicated to the emerging field of forensic linguistics. There are competing definitions and delimitations of this term but here we will use it to refer to the investigation and elucidation of language evidence in a legal context. This includes the scrutiny of language data from different stage...

The oral examination of defendants and witnesses is a cornerstone in most criminal trials, where the weight and credibility of what is said and the certainty with which testimony is delivered will often be decisive for the ruling of the court. This chapter presents a case study of the linguistic construction of certainty and uncertainty – or episte...

The second issue of Volume 41 (autumn 2018) of the Nordic Journal of Linguistics will be a special issue devoted to forensic linguistics in the Nordic countries and in Europe. The issue will be edited by Tanya Karoli Christensen and Sune Sønderberg Mortensen.

This study explores the constituent order of the right periphery of Danish sentences in modern spoken and written discourse. While it is commonly held that final nominal clauses, due to weight, are positioned ‘outside’ the sentence, very few studies have discussed exactly where this outside position is located in relation to other right peripheral...

This paper discusses criteria for distinguishing ATTRIBUTIVE (also known as adjectival) clauses and RELATIVE clauses, and argues that traditional approaches to these subclause categories and their interrelation lack consistency as well as empirical justification, from a modern Scandinavian perspective. Relative clauses are traditionally and in curr...

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This paper proposes a general structural-functional classification of Danish subclauses, based on their distributional properties. It is argued that traditional divisions into, for example, nominal/complement, attributive/relative and adverbial subclauses are inadequate on their own, because they only account for the syntactic functions of the clau...

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