Preaspiration in the Nordic Languages: Synchronic and Diachronic ...

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would first like to thank Olle Engstrand, who has been my thesis advisor
from the outset. His advice, support and encouragement in all aspects
of this thesis project have made it possible for me to complete it. At
the same time, I would like to extend my gratitude to the SWEDIA 2000
project (funded by The Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Foundation, Riksbankens
Jubileumsfond), from which I have been able to benefit both in
the data collection and analysis phases of this work. Svenska Institutet
(The Swedish Institute) has also provided funding for my research and I
am thankful for their support.
This dissertation rests on the input from a lot of people, participants
in the Phonetics Seminar at the Department of Linguistics in Stockholm
as well as other friends and colleagues. Let me just mention a few.
Björn Lindblom has been an invaluable source of motivation for me
during my time at Stockholm University. I am especially indebted to him
for his endless patience with my more naïve ideas in the course of our
lengthy conversations.
A large amount of data from different Nordic languages are dealt
with in this dissertation, and I would never have been able to handle it all
on my own. In this respect I am particularly grateful to Sven Björsten for
helping me collect the Central Standard Swedish data, Gunnar Nyström
for advice concerning the Swedish dialectal material, Jan-Olof Svantesson
for providing me with Mongolian examples, Päivi Juvonen and Eeva
Koponen for supplying Finnish examples, Karin Kass for making the
Faroese recordings possible, Sjúrður Gullbein for transliterating the
Faroese data, Anders G. Eriksson for transliterating much of the Swedish
dialectal material, Elísabet Eir Cortes for assisting me in transliterating
Icelandic data, and Kåre Sjölander for providing me with WaveSurfer,
the program that generated the excellent spectrograms that grace many of
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