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The 2010 ScanDiaSyn status and forecast
Tromsø 2 February 2010
Dear collaborators and followers of the Scandinavian Dialect Syntax project,
It's already February and perhaps a little late to wish you all a Happy New Year, but I do hope you've all had a good start of 2010!
A transitional year ahead
This year will in various ways be "transitional" for the collaboration. It's the final year of the NORMS funding, and the NordForsk network grant that we have had since 2005, is now also officially over. But as the old network winds down another commences: The new Nordic Collaboration on Language Variation (N'CLAV), led by Maia Andréasson, is now up and running and had its first group leader meeting in Gothenburg in January (see this page). Comprising all of the former Nordic ScanDiaSyn groups, this new network nevertheless scopes wider than just over syntactic variation and will in the coming three years be a platform for exchange of ideas and knowledge regarding language variation in the Nordic countries, organized through annual grand meetings and intensive, week-long fieldwork trips of the "NORMS type". So, although the rather comprehensive activity scheme that we have had in recent years, is likely to wind down, Nordic grand meetings and fieldwork excursions will be organized also in the coming three years, albeit with a broader scope than before.
The 2010 Grand Meeting at Sommarøya, Tromsø
The main event in 2010 will be the 6th Grand Meeting for Scandinavian Dialect Syntax to be organized 7-9 June at Sommarøya outside of Tromsø, see this page. The meeting will at the same time be the 1st Grand Meeting for Nordic Language Variation and co-funded by ScanDiaSyn and N'CLAV. Invited speakers at the meeting are Bert Vaux (Cambridge; definite confirmation pending), Bruce Morén-Duolljá (Tromsø), Caroline Heycock & Antonella Sorace (Edinburgh), and Helge Sandøy (Bergen). A substantial portion of the program will otherwise be set aside for presentations by young scholars.
As in the last few years there will be a network quota of two participants per ScanDiaSyn/N'CLAV group (and this applies also to the three non-Nordic groups in ScanDiaSyn). Additional participants with other funding are of course welcome, as always. Further information about the meeting will be sent out within short, with a request to register participants by medio March.
NORMS closing seminar and 25th Comparative Germanic Syntax Workshop
The Grand Meeting will be immediately followed by a combined one day NORMS seminar and the 25th CGSW which will be organized in Tromsø town (presumably on campus), 10-12 June. Invited speakers at this event will be David Adger (Queen Mary, London), Artemis Alexiadou (Stuttgart), and Richard S. Kayne (NYU). For CGSW a Call for Papers is out and the deadline for submission is February 8 – for further information see this page.
At the NORMS closing seminar there will be a series of select collaborative papers taken to reflect some of the work carried out during the NORMS period. Possible contributions have been solicited within the network, and a program for the NORMS day will be announced at the same time as the CGSW program (medio March): some likely topics are verb movement, pragmatic particles, wh-syntax, (dative) case.
Running projects
The upcoming termination of NORMS and the ScanDiaSyn NordForsk network grant does not entail the end to all dialect syntax activities, neither in the short nor in the longer perspective. The Norwegian subproject of ScanDiaSyn, NorDiaSyn, will be running throughout 2012 and so will the NorDiaCorp project. Data collection in Sweden and Finland is currently taking place as a part of the NorDiaCorp project, and a total three researcher positions of appr. 2 years each will be advertised at some point this year in NorDiaCorp/NorDiaSyn combined. These positions will be devoted to dissemination and database and atlas development on the basis of all the data that has been collected over the years of the collaboration.
Throughout 2010 NORMS funded researchers will be active in various partner groups, and at the Text Laboratory the further development of the Nordic Dialect Corpus and the Nordic Syntactic Judgments Database is going on at full pace. Several improvements have been implemented since the Grand Meeting in Älvdalen in August last year, and I urge you all to take a look at this joint infrastructure of ours. (Access through this page – login and password for the corpus is identical; starts with a "de" and ends with "mo". Login data for the database can be obtained from the Text Lab people.)
Whether additional projects will continue to grow out of the ScanDiaSyn/NORMS collaboration remains to be seen, and I hold it as far from unlikely.
Upcoming activities
Other than the Grand Meeting there are several planned activities related to ScanDiaSyn in 2010, some with definite dates and others still in the making. The following is a list of various events either organized by people in ScanDiaSyn/NORMS or which is of relevance to the network:
- 18-21 April: NLVN Researcher training course and fieldwork on dative in Oppdal and Surnadal, organized by Tor A. Åfarli. Deadline for registration is 15 February – contact Tor or me for further information.
- 20-21 May: Seminar on Language Contact in Tromsø, with Peter Auer, Ellen Bijvoet, and Camilla Wide as invited speakers. The seminar is organized by Hilde Sollid, and she can be contacted for further information.
- 7-9 June: Grand Meeting, Tromsø. Deadline for registration: 15 March.
- 10-12 June: NORMS closing seminar and 25 CGSW.
- 18-21 August: 9. Nordiska dialektologikonferencen, Uppsala University. Deadline for abstract submission: 1 May.
- 25-27 August: 24th Scandinavian Conference of Linguistics, University of Joensuu. Deadline for abstract submission: 1 March.
- 2-3 September: Seminar on Empiricial Linguistics, University of Oslo, organized by Janne.
- 22-24 September: Language contact and change: Grammatical structure encounters the fluidity of language, Trondheim, conference organized by Brit Mæhlum and Tor A. Åfarli. Deadline for abstract submission: 10 April.
- October (exact date pending): Workshop on the Acquisition of Language Variation, CASTL, University of Tromsø.
- 11-12 November: Experimental Approaches to Perception and Production of Language Variation (ExAPP2010), Groningen. Deadline for abstract submission: 15 March.
I'm sure there are additional events of interest that could be added to this list, and as for activities in the making by people in the network, we are trying to set up a NORMS fieldwork in Bornholm and several of the NORMS thematic groups have otherwise flagged an interest for organizing workshops. Information about this will appear on the ScanDiaSyn and NORMS web pages as soon as they materialize.
Dissemination
We have lately been working on several publications simultaneously, and the volume NORMS papers on Faroese has just come out as volume 36:2 of Nordlyd: Tromsø Working Papers on Language and Linguistics, see this page. The volume contains as many as 12 papers on various aspects of Faroese, and download is of course entirely free.
The volume Studies in Övdalian Syntax is in the final production stage and will appear on John Benjamins later this year. The volume on North Norwegian syntax will also soon be ready, and we are also working towards publishing a volume of Nordlyd with papers on Northern Ostrobothnian. Moreover, a special issues of Studia Linguistica on exclamatives based on the NORMS workshop in 2007 will appear this spring.
In addition I would like to point out that the last four volumes of Working Papers in Scandinavian Syntax is now freely available online at the following addresses http://project.sol.lu.se/grimm/working-papers-in-scandinavian-syntax/ and http://norms.uit.no/wpss/.
Nordic breadth versus European focus
As already noted, the new N'CLAV network will pick up the NORMS tradition of organizing fieldworks in selected places and areas and the ScanDiaSyn tradition of grand meetings. At the European level we (Sjef Barbiers, Cecilia Poletto, and the undersigned) have submitted a five year network proposal (DIA-∑) to the European Science Foundation which on the one hand will organize five cross-institutional thematic groups with one meeting per year and on the other hand annual grand meetings.
We keep our fingers crossed for a positive outcome of the DIA-∑ application, and if indeed granted, one could say that the ScanDiaSyn/NORMS collaboration will develop in two directions: at the Nordic level towards a broader collaboration on language variation and at the European level towards a focused collaboration on dialect syntax across most (if not all) European languages.
On this note of anticipation I end my letter and urge you to keep up the good work. I'll be looking forward to seeing you all on various occasions in the coming year!
Sincerely yours,
Øystein
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