Where grammar and interaction meet: The preference for matched polarity in responsive turns in Danish

Abstract

This paper focuses on the use of the Danish negative response particle nej 'no' and its use in ordinary interaction. I demonstrate how this negative particle is typically used as an interactionally preferred response to prior negatively framed utterances, implementing, for instance, agreement, affiliation, or acknowledgement rather than being used as a marker of dispreference, as is often indicated in the literature. Hence, I argue that in Danish there is a strong connection between grammar and polarity on the one hand, and interactional preference on the other, so that the interactional preference is typically achieved through mirroring the polariy of a prior turn in the response. I further demonstrate that this grammatical preference for mirrored polarity in Danish is so strong that a 'special' positive reponse particle jo 'yes2' rather than ja 'yes1' is deployed in orientation to this pattern when negatively framed utterances, for whatever reason, receive a positive reponse. To conclude, I discuss how findings from other languages indicate that this pattern may not be particular to Danish, though the strength with which polarity is oriented to across languages appear to differ to various extents.