North Germanic Negation - Munin

METHODOLOGY
In my thesis, maps from the NSD-database are used to indicate potential isoglosses for North
Germanic. Because the national questionnaires are not identical, data from some of the languages
lack in each map. Examples from the questionnaire/the NSD-database are marked throughout the
thesis.
2.2.4.2 Potential problems and discussion
Some of the results from the NSD-database, especially the ones concerning the relative order of
negation and pronouns (cf. the sentences in (3) above), are associated with some methodological
problems, which are discussed above in section 2.2.2.5.
In my searches I have included all locations, including the ones where I know there have been
some problematic issues (see section 2.2.2.5 above). The reason for this choice, is that we do not
know how the fieldworker has engaged him-/herself in these issues. It might be that the fieldworker
has sorted things out so that the informants have judged the sentences according to the intended
meaning. Furthermore, I have not checked the recordings for every location, so we do not know how
widespread such problems might be. Another precaution one needs to make, is that there might be
unknown sources of errors in each location. Because of this, it is in my opinion better to include all
the answers. They must however be treated with the utmost care, which I usually have solved by
also consulting the corpus data.
Variation in the judgements of particular sentences is easily shown in a map. When interpreting
the result, one also needs to use one’s qualified opinion. If, for instance, informants from most of
the locations except a few scattered all over the country, accept a given structure, one should, I
think, not pay too much attention to the deviant locations. If, however, the locations with deviant
scores belong to the same area as the other ones, it might show a (real) isogloss.
2.2.5 Nordic Dialect Corpus
The Nordic Dialect Corpus (Johannessen et al. 2009; Johannessen et al. 2012) (henceforth the NDCcorpus)
is a multimedia corpus of spontaneous speech, which contains data from Norwegian,
Danish, Swedish, Icelandic and Faroese. Some of the data come from the ScanDiaSyn work, whereas
other data, such as most of the material from Sweden, were recorded earlier. The number of words,
informants and locations for each language are given in Table 7 (Johannessen et al. 2012: 3387).
Table 7: The content of the NDC-corpus
Country Number of words Number of informants Number of locations
Norway 2 186 318 564 163
Denmark 211 266 81 15
Sweden 307 861 126 39
Iceland 23 626 10 2
Faroe Islands 62 411 20 5
Total 2 791 482 801 223
The data are not completely uniform (Johannessen et al. 2012). Disregarding the fact that not all of
the recordings and transcriptions were made especially for this corpus, not all locations are
represented by both young and old informants or by both audio and video files. Furthermore, it
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