North Germanic Negation - Munin

METHODOLOGY
traditional variety. An illustration of the first case is from the town in Northern Norway mentioned
above, where the old female informant has more traditional dialect features than the old male
informant with whom she is talking. This results in the old man using the negative marker ikkje in the
conversation, whereas he uses the negative marker ikke in the interview. This could also be
recognised as accommodation to the fieldworker, but the fieldworker speaks a distant dialect that
also has the marker ikkje. The young informants use the marker ikke, and it is likely that the old man
do so too (cf. Jahr and Skare 1996: 56 who note that the marker ikke is common in Northern
Norwegian cities). In another rural place in Northern Norway, the old male informant corrects
himself after uttering the noun sjøen (‘the sea’) and gives the traditional form sjyn (‘the sea’). Such
accommodation at the lexical level affects the frequencies, but in these cases it has (most likely) no
effect on the syntax.
An informant who is well suited for speech recordings is, however, not necessarily suited for
judgement tasks. For judgement tasks Cornips and Poletto (2005: 946) list that good informants
should be able to concentrate on the grammatical issues of the test sentences, and that the
informants should be able to focus on their own, local dialect, and not infer from more standardised
or more archaic varieties.
The sentences in the questionnaire vary in difficulty, and the sentences in (3) above belong to the
difficult ones. The intended meanings of the three sentences are identical, as indicated by the
translation. In order for this to be possible, the pronouns (and the negative marker) must be
unstressed, which is indicated by the Eastern Norwegian clitic pronoun a (‘her’). In the dialects that
have such distinct clitic pronouns, the prosody should in principle be easy to monitor (but see
section 2.2.2.5.2 above). If there are no clitic pronouns, the order (finite verb, henceforth ‘v fin ’ >)
neg(ation) > pron(oun) in (3a,b) can easily be interpreted as the pronoun being in focus, and then
the sentences are judged on wrong grounds. It should however be noted that the most appropriate
pronouns for each dialect are used, so that the pronoun a is only used in dialects that has this
particular pronoun.
2.2.2.5.6 Informants’ use of the judgement scale
The informants potentially use the judgement scale differently, as illustrated in section 2.1.2. Sorace
and Keller (2005: 1499) note that “acceptability judgments are subject to a considerable number of
biases”, and as discussed above a fixed scale is probably not the best method. When there is a
higher number informants, however, the variation will to some extent be adjusted. This also means
that the tendencies in a material, realised as for instance average scores, are more important than
the exact scores of each informant.
There are also examples in the data collection of informants rejecting structures that they
produce themselves, a problem which is related to the issue of good contra bad informants in the
preceding subsection. I experienced this myself during my own participation in the data collection.
high status, which can lead one into thinking accommodation is not a problem in Norway. However, there are
many examples of regional dialect levelling (Mæhlum et al. 2003), which imply that accommodation is
common – at least among young speakers. For Norwegian, it is often claimed that accommodation goes
towards a regional standard rather than towards standard Norwegian in the sense of the South-Eastern
‘standard’ dialect around Oslo.
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