North Germanic Negation - Munin

METHODOLOGY
In the first fieldworks I noted the results on a paper and subsequently typed it in Excel, but in
later fieldworks they were typed directly in Excel, in addition to comments from the informants that
were added by the comment function in Excel. I have used the various features of Excel in order to
do basic statistical calculations on the answers. I have not excluded any informants, and any
calculation is made for the particular test sentence.
In the text, the average judgement scores of the sentences are either given, or converted to the
acceptability markers asterisks ‘*’ and question marks ‘?’/’??’ by the following rules:
Table 5: Rules for converting the scores
Three-way scale
Four-way scale
* 1.0-1.5 * 1.0-1.5
?? 1.6-2.0 ?? 1.6-2.5
? 2.1-2.5 ? 2.6-3.5
No mark=ok 2.6-3 No mark=ok 3.6-4.0
In the left columns with the three-way scale (all fieldworks except the one in Fosen), we see that the
ranges of the different acceptability marks are almost equal (approximately 0.5). In the four-way
scale group (Fosen), the ranges of the degraded question marks are 0.9, whereas the extremities ‘*’
and ‘ok’ are more restricted. Note, however, that for the extremities the ranges are identical to the
corresponding ones of the three-way scale.
2.2.3.3 Potential problems and discussion
The selection of informants has varied from place to place. This is not ideal when doing quantitative
studies and comparisons of material, but it should not matter too much for qualitative studies as
long as the number of informants from each location is relatively large.
Ideally, the fieldworker has the same dialect as the informants, as mentioned above. My dialect is
not identical to any of the dialects given in Table 4, but it is relatively close to the Fosen dialect. This
is of course not ideal, but my impression has been that it has not been very problematic. When
visiting the Swedish and Finnish locations, it might have been an advantage that I did not speak
standard Eastern Norwegian.
I have tried to utter the test sentences as idiomatically as possible, which has, at least for the
Norwegian places, been relatively unproblematic, since I am fairly familiar with these varieties. It has
been more problematic during the fieldworks in Älvdalen and in Finland, but not as bad as I had
feared, since these dialects were relatively easy to understand. The informants were also helpful,
and together we solved difficulties. I can, however, not dismiss the possibility that some of them
accommodated to a standard when talking to me or judging the sentences.
In the text the average score rather than the median is given. I have done so because the average
pays attention to all values irrespective of extremeness, while the median is less– if at all – affected
by extreme values. It might be a good thing that the extremes are not taken into consideration, for
instance if nine informants have given the score 4, while only one has given the score 1. The median
and the average will in this case be 4 and 3.7, respectively, hence the median is opaque with respect
to variation, while the average is transparent, although it does not show the distribution of the
scores. I think it is valuable to establish whether there was any disagreement in the scores, and
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