Anthropocentric linguistics and Danish grammar: Following the book “Anthropocentric Danish Grammar”

Modern descriptive grammars including the “Anthropocentric Danish grammar” (2024) edited by Dina B. Nikulicheva often contain claims that language-specific features of the object language prompt the implementation of general theories of a certain kind, e.g. cognitive or functional. I argue that linguistic traditions focusing on particular languages, e.g. Danish or Russian, contribute to language theory by generalizing empirical observations on the language-specific datasets and providing the models that are potentially applicable to a wider class of the world’s languages. However, the constructs of the type ‘a language like L (Danish, Russian, etc.)’, ‘a language of the analytic type’ are not operational, and a linguist must check every grammatical parameter and correlation between different parameters based on language samples. The book under review provides reliable descriptions of the fragments of Danish grammar related to deictic categories and encoding of epistemic and evidential meanings.