North Germanic Negation - Munin

METHODOLOGY
is missing for the Oslo dialect. Most critical for the purpose of establishing dialect grammars is the
lack of production data, since they corroborate judgement data. I can therefore not be conclusive on
the dialect grammar for Northern Ostrobothnian.
The lack of judgement data from the Oslo dialect does not affect the possibility of establishing a
grammar for this dialect, although judgements would be valuable in order to get insights to the
speakers’ own intuitions when discussing structural analyses. This may sound as if I regard
judgement data as direct expressions of the mental grammar, but that is not my intention, see
section 2.1.2. As we will see below, the corpus containing the Oslo dialect is large, as opposed to the
available corpora containing the other dialects, and it contains many instances of the investigated
word orders.
The overarching project umbrella to one of the main corpora I have used, is presented and
discussed in the next subsection.
2.2.2 ScanDiaSyn – Scandinavian Dialect Syntax
ScanDiaSyn is an umbrella for several projects aimed at systematically investigating dialectal
syntactic variation across the North Germanic dialect continuum (Vangsnes 2007). The projects have
involved national dialect syntax projects as well as infrastructure projects for making the results
available. Spontaneous speech has been collected from the locations indicated in Map 3 on the next
page, and in addition judgement data has been collected from partly the same locations. The speech
recordings are available through an online, tagged corpus (Nordic Dialect Corpus), and the
judgement data are collected in an online database (Nordic Syntax Database). The NSD-database is
described below in section 2.2.4, and the NDC-corpus is described section 2.2.5.
The methodology for the collection of data has varied a bit from country to country, and this will
be clarified in the following subsections on the national parts. The judgement data are based on a
list of approximately 1400 potentially relevant test sentences that were worked out in linguistically
organised thematic groups. The national questionnaires form subsets of this large ScanDiaSyn list,
and the specific choices are based on the researchers’ individual linguistic interests, and “on what is
considered relevant in each dialect” (Lindstad et al 2009: 283). The judgement scale used is invariant
across the countries, and goes from 1 (bad) to 5 (good).
In the following I will give an overview of the Norwegian, Swedish and Danish parts of
ScanDiaSyn. Iceland and the Faroe Islands also participated in the project, but since I have not made
use of the data collected from these parts of Scandinavia to any significant degree, I do not include
them in the following survey.
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