The Nordic research infrastructure for syntactic variation: Possibilities, limitations and achievements

Abstract

The Scandinavian Dialect Syntax project was a collaboration between ten research groups from all of the five Nordic countries lasting for a period of about ten years. Besides resulting in a large number of scientific papers and theses on a range of different topics, a concrete outcome of the collaboration was the establishment of lasting research infrastructures in terms of two databases: the Nordic Dialect Corpus (NDC) and the Nordic Syntax Database (NSD). This paper first describes the two infrastructures and then proceeds to showcase how they may be used for the exploration of two selected dialect syntactic topics: the relative placement of sentence adverbs and infinitive markers (±split infinitives) across varieties of Mainland North Germanic, and the lack of Verb Second in wh-questions across Norwegian dialects.

Joina du kino imårgå? Ungdommars dialektskriving på sosiale medium

“…inndelinga i Maehlum & Røyneland 2012): Lofoten (nordnorsk), Surnadal på Nordmøre (trøndersk), Sykkylven på Sunnmøre (vestnorsk), Nord-Gudbrandsdalen (austnorsk). I gjennomgangen vår av den talemålsnaere skrivinga til ungdommane kjem vi til å halde henne opp mot velkjende, tradisjonelle målmerke ved dialektane på dei ulike stadene, og som samanlikningsgrunnlag for dataa våre vil vi i somme tilfelle sjå på data frå Nordisk dialektkorpus (heretter 'NDK') som inneheld talemålsopptak samla inn i perioden 2005-2010 (Johannessen et al 2009;Johannessen et al 2014;Vangsnes & Johannessen 2019).…”

COMP trace effects across North Germanic varieties

“…At most locations there were four informants who judged the individual test sentences on a Likert scale from 1 (bad) to 5 (good). The results from the questionnaires can be retrieved from the Nordic Syntax Database (NSD) (Lindstad et al 2009;Vangsnes & Johannessen 2019, see also list of online resources). Furthermore, the NSD interface has a map function which allows automatic generation of maps that visualize the results, and all maps that follow are such maps unless otherwise stated.…”

“…In this paper we will do precisely that. We will take a closer look at various exceptions to the COMP trace effect across varieties of North Germanic, with an emphasis on data collected within the Scandinavian Dialect Syntax project (see Vangsnes 2007;Vangsnes and Johannessen 2019), both as part of the systematic questionnaire-based data collection across an evenly distributed number of locations and as part of focused NORMS 2 fi eldtrips to selected areas, notably the ones to Western Jutland and the Faroe Islands in 2008. Section 2 is devoted to a presentation of the systematic data collection carried out for Norwegian and Swedish dialects.…”