For Danish modal verbs, the standard suffix for supine is -et, but infinitivus pro participio with the non-standard suffix -e also occurs in writing. Here we explore the distribution of the two forms for six Danish modal verbs: kunne(t), ville(t), skulle(t), måtte(t), burde(t) and turde(t). The first part of our study explores the distribution in 73 high school essays. The second part reports the results of a gap-fill task where a different group of high school students (N = 220) inserted inflected modal verbs. The third part is a corpus study of both contemporary written Danish and 19th century Danish.
Our study shows that both high school students and contemporary texts from the corpus use the non-standard -e, and that there are considerable differences between the six modal verbs.