Abstract Jan-Ola Östman

Constructions and pragmatics in dialectology research

In my classes I want to combine the three strands of research that have occupied my work in linguistics over the years: constructions, pragmatics, and dialectology.
   In the research tradition called Construction Grammar (CxG) started by Charles Fillmore in the early eighties (with precursors in Case Grammar and Frame Semantics), the technical concept of ‘construction’ is the backbone of investigations into language. I want to show the importance of taking this approach in dealing with dialect data, where the crucial thing (in a constructional view) is to inductively and in a data-driven fashion see every language and dialect as a system per se, without preconceived notions about what we would like to find. In the last resort this means that a language fragment or an idiomatic expression is seen as an equally core construct(ion) in a language as is, say, a positive, declarative, transitive clause.
   In order to understand and to be able to explicate syntactic peculiarities in a language, form cannot be separated from function. A construction is always a form-function constellation. The pragmatic side of my classes will give an overview of the PIA (Pragmatics as Implicit Anchoring) approach to language function, showing how large-scale pragmatic issues can be systematized and formalized in a manner well attuned to the CxG framework. The backbone of the PIA framework is built on the workings of the three parameters of Coherence (restraints imposed by culture, tradition, ideology, society), Politeness (interactional and dialogical constraints), and Involvement (affect, taboo), and how these constrain syntactic realizations.
   I work mostly with the 80 or so (traditional) dialects of Swedish in Finland. Methodologically, we do fieldwork – so far we have visited one dialect area per year – and employ a host of different methods in attempting to collect ‘natural’ data: loosely structured discussions, interviews, oral questionnaires, informants’ own writings, tests of various kinds (pictures as prompts, categorization of colours), films as prompts, etc. We are particularly interested in the dialects as they are spoken in various parts of the country today (incl. issues of dialect levelling, sociolects, etc.), and compare what we find with earlier records, and how the close contact to Finnish might have influenced the structures of the dialects. As in most places, earlier research on syntactic issues are scarce. However, we find that the constructional approach and the pragmatic view of language and discourse have helped to give us an unbiased view of dialect syntax.