North Germanic Negation - Munin

METHODOLOGY
2.2.2.1 The Norwegian part
The general guideline for the Norwegian part was to find four informants on each location that met
the following requirements (Vangsnes 2007: 59):
• A male speaker between 15 and 30 years (identified as location_01um)
• A female speaker between 15 and 30 years (identified as location_02uk)
• A male speaker older than 50 years (identified as location_03gm)
• A female speaker older than 50 years (identified as location_04gk)
Ideally, the informants are born and raised at the location, and they should furthermore not have
lived outside the location for more than seven years in total.
The informants were recorded in an interview and a conversation. The interviews lasted for
approximately ten to fifteen minutes, during which the fieldworker tried to get the informant to talk
as much as possible. The conversations lasted for half an hour or more, and took place between two
informants, and in most cases the old ones talked to each other and the young ones to each other.
In order to get the atmosphere as easy and comfortable as possible, the fieldworker left the room,
and sweets, fruit and drinks were served to the informants. The informants were instructed not to
talk about sensitive topics such as politics, and they were provided with a list of suggested topics of
conversation in case needed.
Acceptability judgements have been collected from the same informants. The NorDiaSyn
questionnaire contains 140 test sentence chosen from the common pool of around 1400 sentences
mentioned above (Lindstad et al. 2009: 283). The test sentences have in most cases been prerecorded
by someone who speaks the local dialect so as to avoid phonetic deviation being a
disturbing factor (cf. Cornips and Poletto 2005: 946). These recordings were played one by one to
the informants.
2.2.2.2 The Danish part
In the Danish part of the project (DanDiaSyn) informants from 11 locations participated. This
number is much smaller than the corresponding numbers in the Norwegian and Swedish parts. The
reason behind this choice is that the dialect levelling in Denmark is so advanced that it would not
necessarily be fruitful to include more locations (Hagedorn and Jørgensen 2009).
The requirements for the Danish informants differ a bit from the Norwegian ones: There should
be at least five informants from each location; all should be more than 60 years old; they should
have at most seven years of education (i.e. only primary school); and they should have lived in the
place most of their lives (Hagedorn and Jørgensen 2009: 169). These requirements are similar to the
ones in the SAND dialect project in Belgium and the Netherlands (Cornips and Poletto 2005: 946).
In the Danish data collection the emphasis was on the questionnaire, but the informants were
also interviewed for approximately fifteen minutes each (Hagedorn and Jørgensen 2009: 169).
The DanDiaSyn questionnaire (chosen from the ScanDiaSyn pool of test sentences) reflects the
research interests of the Danish linguists (Hagedorn and Jørgensen 2009: 170). As for structures
proposed by the other research groups, some of them were believed to be non-existing in Danish
dialects and thus excluded, whereas the other proposed structures were discussed (Hagedorn and
Jørgensen 2009: 170). It is not made clear in Hagedorn and Jørgensen (2009) which ones were
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