|
0
Access to resources for microcomparative grammar research
Øystein Alexander Vangsnes
CASTL, UiT
Solstrand meeting – CLARIN/Norsk Språkbank
15-16 December 2008
Goal of this presentation:
Provide a practical example of some of the resources electronically available for carrying out microcomparative grammar research.
1. Lexicalization of wh-domains
(1) How will you solve the issue?
(2) What does he look like?
(3) What kind of car do you have?
(4) Which car is yours?
(5) Who will you entertain tonight?
The lexicalization of these five syntactic wh-contexts vary across varieties of Scandianvian (click table to magnify):
Given the table it is tempting to postulate the existence of an underlying conceptual/semantic continuum of meaning whereby one use of a wh-item can only be extended to the one adjacent to it. In order to pursue such a hypothesis, detailed information about many different grammars are desireable, and dialect grammars are especially interesting since both since they are minimally different and since one can pair grammatical information with geography, possibly yielding useful diachronic insights.
2. Determinative ‘hvem’
– Google: "Hvem båt" – web searches can indeed be used to study this area of grammar, but one has less control with metadata.
– Amund B Larsen – digital copy available at the National Library (NB); OCR scan searchable on the NB web site, but not from the outside.
– NoTa-korpuset – Corpus of spoken Oslo Norwegian; password protected because of person data; searchable (not from the outside) by all kinds of linguistic and non-linguistic variables.
– Nordic Dialect Corpus (shortcut) – the dialect corpus now being developed within ScanDiaSyn; password protected because of person data; searchable (not from the outside) by all kinds of linguistic and non-linguistic variables.
The beta version of the Nordic Dialect Corpus can be accessed by entering the word displayed to the right as both user name and password – and this may also work for a restricted period to access the NoTa corpus. Comments to the Nordic Dialect Corpus are most welcome!
3. Hvílíkr ~ hvilken
– Menota – free access archive of Medieval Nordic manuscripts; searchable by lexical items and linguistic features etc., but not from the outside, and requires knowledge about the (old) languages to do meaningful searches.
– J. Fritzner – extensive, classical dictionary for Old Norse; searchable by Old Norse lemmas (not word forms, not items in the translations/explanations); not searchable from the outside.
– Google "hvilikr"
– Rietz' Svenskt dialektlexikon (Projekt Runeberg) – digitized manuscript with openly accessible OCR-scan, hence searchable from the outside; wiki-edited on a voluntary basis.
– Norsk Ordbok – not yet available on the web; contains vast amounts of interesting data.
4. Åssen, hvordan, korleis, korsn, hvernig etc.
Hypothesis: ‘degree how’ ≤ ‘manner how’, cf.:
korleis vs. kor gammel (Nynorsk)
hvordan vs. hvor gammel (Bokmål)
åssen vs. å gammal (Eastern Norw.)
hur vs. hur gammal (Swedish)
hvussu vs. hvussu gamal (Faroese)
hvern-ig vs. hvað gamall (Ice.)
Furthermore: Wherever ’manner how’ is more complex than ‘degree how’, degree how is either the same as ‘where’ or as ‘what’ (or ‘where’ involves ‘what’). In order to pursue these hypotheses information about the relationship between degree and manner ‘how’ plus ‘what’ and ‘where’ is necessary across a large number of dialects.
– Norsk Ordbok– not yet available on the web; contains vast amounts of relevant information.
5. Conclusion
There is an enormous potential for better coodination of resources and for finding ways of making them accessible. This holds for microcomparative grammar research, but surely also holds more generally.
Further readings (for those interested in the linguistic issues touched upon – comments welcome! ;-)
Vangsnes, Øystein A. 2008a. Decomposing manner how in colloquial Scandinavian. Studia Linguistica, 62:119 - 141
Vangsnes, Øystein A. 2008b. Omkring adnominalt åssen/hvordan i Oslo-målet. In Janne B. Johannessen and Kristin Hagen (eds.): Språk i Oslo. Ny forskning omkring talespråk. Novus forlag, Oslo, 50-61.
Vangsnes, Øystein A. 2008c. What kind of Scandinavian? On wh-nominals across North Germanic. Nordic Journal of Linguistics, 31:227-251.
Vangsnes, Øystein A. 2008d. "Hvem blogg liker du best?", blog entry at forskning.no, 11 December 2008.
|
