Hva: (what4)
The word hvad ’what’ in written Danish covers at least four different forms with various functions in Danish talk-in-interaction. One of these forms is hva:.
The elongated hva: [væ:] is used in the beginning of an utterance to mark the beginning of a question and is therefore not the same as the interrogative pronoun hva. It seems that hva: most often is used to initiate yes/no-questions and in those cases, the performed action will be a request for confirmation. That is the case in the example below where Bjarne has just called Pelle to hear how far along he is with his cooking:
The excerpt comes right after the opening sequence in a telephone conversation. Line 01 is a yes/no-interrogative question which initiates conversation about a topic, which has not been touched upon previously. We will not exclude the possibility that hva: can also be used to initiate questions other than yes/no-questions, however we have only seen yes/no-questions in our data so far.
Hva: possibly expresses some hesitation from the speaker and can in this way be related to the the hesitation marker øh(m).
Sources and further reading
Brøcker et al. (2012) A thorough run-through of four phenomena in Danish talk in interaction, including the spoken language’ different variations of the written language hvad.
Hansen og Heltoft (2011: 606). The big work on Danish grammar. On page 606 some of the functions of hvad are described, also in the spoken language, though still insufficient in comparison to the description on this website.
Jørgensen (2015). A more elaborate description of the different variants of hvad in spoken language.
Jørgensen (2011b). Short, popular scientific article on sprogmuseet.dk on the four spoken language variants of hvad.
Related entries
The Building Blocks of Talk-in-interaction > Word Classes/Parts of speech > Interjections and particles