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Scandiasyn-bloggen i august 2009
Laurdag 29. august
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| Milk barrels at Gessi summer pasture. (Photo: Maia Andréasson) |
All good things must come to an end, and so did the Älvdalen Grand Meeting too. The bus took us safely and effectively from Älvdalen to Oslo airport this morning, and at the moment of writing I'm sitting at OSL Gardermoen, having said goodbye to groups of delegates, first a bunch taking the train to Oslo, either to stay overnight, continue BACK to Sweden (Gothenburg), or simply going home; then in the terminal to people going in various directions (Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Frankfurt, Trondheim etc.). Torill, Björn, and myself will soon head north past the polar circle to the pearl of Hålogaland, Troms Island.
The last day of the meeting yesterday had again a full program and a tight schedule. Anders Holmberg started in the morning by telling us why he still believes in parameter theory, and that the critics need to think of parameters in a different way. (Interestingly enough he admitted that V-to-I-movement probably does not hinge on rich agreement.) Subsequently, before lunch followed four talks by young NORMS researchers, first two talks on Object Shift by Maia Andréasson and Kristine Bentzen (et al.), then a talk on expletive constructions by Eva Engels, and then a talk by Pål Kr. Eriksen on counterfactuals across varieties of Scandinavian.
Giving in to a request for some shopping time, we extended the lunch break by half an hour, and Halldór Ármann Sigurðsson gave his invited lecture on natural null arguments as the last scientific paper at the meeting. Then followed a session with group work. The participants were divided into seven groups, some of which had specific issues to work with, but most of them with the task to take a look at the Nordic Dialect Corpus and the Nordic Syntactic Judgement Database from a user perspective and to give feedback on features to add or change in these resources.
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| Verf Lena Egardt and Ewa Nylander singing songs in Övdalian at the closing dinner. (Photo: Øystein A. Vangsnes) |
After a couple of hours, we finally had a plenary discussion briefly going through issues that came up in the groups. Janne and the Text Lab people got a number of points that will be useful in their further development of the research infrastructure of the project.
The scientific program ended around 18.30, and after one and a half hour of rest and leisure time we all reconvened in the restaurant for the closing dinner. We were served delicious food: A char paté for starters, minced moose “cakes” with mashed potatotoes and lingonberry jam as the main course, rounded off with chocolate cake with cloudberry sauce for dessert. In addition to the delicious food we were also treated to a very nice cultural experience: The two local musicians Verf Lena Egardt and Ewa Nylander played and sang songs in Övdalian for us, many of which they had composed themselves, and created a very nice atmosphere for us all.
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| Piotr, Ida, Maia, Stig, and Signe discussing over dinner. (Photo: Øystein A. Vangsnes) |
After dinner the socializing continued in the hotel lobby, and some participants continued well into the night. But as far as we know, everybody managed to get up in time for the bus next morning, so there was no fierce knocking on doors the last morning of this year's grand meeting. A seemingly very content group of linguists then left Älvdalen, some of which I'm sure hope to return to do some investigations of the language. And presumably a good portion of the group will it to Tromsø next year when the first grand meeting of the new N'CLAV network will be organized the second week of June in conjunction with CGSW 25.
– Øystein
Torsdag 27. august
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| Øystein A. Vangsnes giving a status report on the collaboration on Scandinavian dialect syntax. (Photo: © Björn Rehnström, Mora Tidning) |
The second day of the Grand Meeting is over and people are winding down at the hotel after dinner. Following the tradition the program of the first day was quite comprehensive and lasted from early morning to well into the evening. I opened the ball with a status report on the collaboration – past events, plans for the future, and a resume of what we have accomplished. Janne B. Johannessen continued with an hour long presentation of the Nordic Dialect Corpus and the Nordic Syntactic Judgement Database, before Maria Vilkuna gave a presentation of the Finnish dialect syntax project which started up last year. Hans Bennis rounded off the project report section of the program by sharing some plans and thoughts for future activities cast within the frame of the Dutch branch of CLARIN.
The first invited speaker, Liliane Haegeman, delivered her lecture on negation in West Flemish after lunch, basically showing that things are more complicated than many before have claimed as far as the syntax of negation is concerned. After Liliane's talk followed the workshop for MA-/PhD-students with seven fine talks on various issues. By seven p.m. in the evening most participants were quite pleased with linguistic input and ready for more culinary input.
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| Lars Steensland, Liliane Haegeman, and Anders Holmberg having a snack with Njupskär waterfall in the background. (Photo: Øystein A. Vangsnes) |
Today we had a special session on Övdalian in the morning. Our second invited speaker, Lars Steensland, gave his talk which was mainly on vocatives in the grammar of Övdalian, but which also contained a number of comments and information on the language and the community in general. Among other things Lasse pointed out that Älvdalen and Övdalian is very conservative “in the positive sense of the word”, one example being the late introduction of Christianity (14th century) and another the long standing use of the runic script – on wood – with the last inscriptions dating from the beginning of the 20th century. Interestingly enough we got to see such a runic inscription later the same day on our excursion!
After Lasse's talk Henrik Rosenkvist and Kristine Bentzen presented the upcoming volume Studies in Övdalian syntax of which Piotr Garbacz and myself gave two examples, Piotr on V-to-I-movement and me on the polyfunctionality of the cognate of ‘which’ (ukin) in the language.
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| Runes in a ruin at Gessi. (Photo: Maia Andréasson)(Click here for a close-up of the inscription.) |
After this morning session, commemorating the 100th anniversary of Levander's thesis, we went straight on our bus excursion, first to Gessi where a young couple has recently taken over this abandoned summer farm and starting restoring it. At Gessi we were served some local home made specialities and some information about local farming traditions. We also got to hear some "kulokk"/"kuling" (‘cattle call’), and in a ruin of one of the many farm houses we in fact got to see a couple of runic inscriptions, one which, at least to an untrained eye, looked quite old an authentic.
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| The Grand Meeting participants at Gessi summer farm. (Photo: © Björn Rehnström, Mora Tidining |
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| Walking up to Njupskär waterfall. (Photo: Øystein A. Vangsnes) |
The excursion then continued northwards through the forests to Fulufjället National Park where we walked for about 20-30 minutes to Sweden's highest waterfall, Njupskär. Some of us Norwegians had beforehand tried to make fun of the fairly modest height of the cascade, but it actually turned out to be very beautiful, and it was a perfect location for our picnic.
After returning from Fulufjället the plan was to visit Rot Skans and the collection of old buildings there where we would have been guided in Övdalian by the famous Gerda Wärff. Unfortunately we got so delayed that she had given up on us when we finally arrived in the dusk, so we missed out on this experience.
Kjell Sletten, native of Trysil just across the Norwegian border, whom many of us got to know during the NORMS fieldwork in 2007, also paid us a visit during this meeting. Kjell was also very helpful last year when Signe and Ingebjörg from Oslo collected material from the Trysil dialect. Being a true fan of Övdalian, he expressed his deepfelt gratitude for getting to sit in on some of the lectures and for accompanying us on our excursion.
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| Kjell Sletten and Halldór Ármann Sigurðsson discussing at Gessi summer farm. (Photo: Kristin M. Eide) |
People seemed to be quite satisfied with the excursion and the program in general, and after a good night's sleep, ahead of us now lie a series of lectures in the morning, to be followed by group work and a final plenary discussion. And then the grand finale tomorrow night, of course!... ;-)
– Øystein
Tysdag 25. august
This morning the group leaders of the ScanDiaSyn network convened for an intensive meeting at the Oslo airport Gardermoen. Some of the conveners and a few others had also met the day before at a different meeting at the University of Oslo to discuss details of the upcoming collection of questionnaire data from Swedish (and Finland-Swedish) dialects.
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| Älvdalen Main Street, August 2009. (Photo: Maia Andréasson) |
After lunch the group leaders teamed up at the terminal with the rest of the tenfolds of linguists bound for the 2009 Grand Meeting for Scandinavian Dialect Syntax in Älvdalen. A few people had cancelled their participation the last couple of days due to illness and other understandable reasons, but strangely enough there were no delayed flights and no problems whatsoever with respect to gathering the people and transporting them the four hours it takes to drive through the western edge of the Taiga into Älvdalen.
There has been a bit of media attention for our meeting the last few days. On Friday 21 the journalist Björn Rehnström wrote an article in Mora Tidning (Dalarnas Tidningar) about the event and today an interview with Henrik Rosenkvist was broadcasted on Swedish national radio (in Vetenskapsradion: Språket, Sveriges Radio P1 – the interview can be heard by following a link from this page). Moreover, I wrote a blog about our meeting for forskning.no, the Norwegian national portal for communication of science, which was also published today.
We are now ready to start the meeting proper tomorrow morning.
– Øystein
Onsdag 19. august
There have been several updates over the last days on the homepage for the upcoming Grand Meeting in Älvdalen next week. You will now find a revised program linked-up with abstracts, a list of participants, as well as links to several resources on Övdalian if you're keen to get into that.
– Øystein
Tisdag 4 augusti
N'CLAV – Nordic Collaboration on LAnguage Variation studies
In the middle of the beautiful Nordic summer, NordForsk announced that the project N'CLAV – Nordic Collaboration on LAnguage Variation studies – has received a three year grant covering networking and research training activities.
The focus in N'CLAV will be to bring researchers and research students from theoretical, descriptive and applied linguistics together in one network, (a) working together with field work on language variation and (b) in yearly Grand Meetings.
The network includes researchers from Denmark, Faroe Islands, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden; some of these have a mainly theoretical, structural approach, others a sociolinguistic approach, there are individuals or groups that focus on dialect-geographic issues whereas others have a background in language technology and computational linguistics.
N'CLAV grows out of the networks Nordic Language Variation (NLVN) and Scandinavian Dialect Syntax (ScanDiaSyn), and the Nordic Center of Excellence in Microcomparative Syntax (NORMS). N'CLAV will expand on the experiences made within these previous networks and both develop high level activities and include new groups of researchers in the activities. N'CLAV aims to become a powerful tool for co-operation and research training and a base for broad cross-theorethical research, matching international networks and collaboration of the same kind.
– Maia
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