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

Øystein Alexander Vangsnes,Janne Bondi Johannessen

doi:10.5334/gjgl.708

Øystein Alexander Vangsnes, Janne Bondi Johannessen

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.5334/gjgl.708

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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.

Highlights

1 Introduction Since 2003 and for a period of about ten years a network of ten research groups in the five Nordic countries worked within the Scandinavian Dialect Syntax project (ScanDiaSyn) towards mapping syntactic variation across the North Germanic dialect continuum
These data formed the basis for the two different infrastructures in the project: the Nordic Dialect Corpus and the Nordic Syntax Database
Three of the cases are from three locations in Southwestern Norway, indicated by purple markers. Both of these areas are roughly the ones indicated by the letter A in Map 5 above, where the Nordic Syntax Database (NSD) data suggests that informants by and large accept complex wh-phrases in matrix non-V2 questions

Summary

Introduction

Since 2003 and for a period of about ten years a network of ten research groups in the five Nordic countries worked within the Scandinavian Dialect Syntax project (ScanDiaSyn) towards mapping syntactic variation across the North Germanic dialect continuum. Two major research tools grew out of the collaboration: the Nordic Dialect Corpus (NDC) and the Nordic Syntax Database (NSD), see Section 2. In this paper we will discuss two syntactic phenomena on the basis of data available from the dual NDC/NSD research infrastructure: (i) the relative placement of adverbs and infinitive markers (±split infinitive), and (ii) non-V2 in matrix wh-questions across Norwegian dialects. For each of these we discuss possibilities, limitations and achievements posed by the research infrastructure as promised by the title of the paper.

The two research infrastructures

Case study 1

Case study 2

Findings

Discussion

Conclusion