The Edinburgh network group

The members of the network group at the University of Edinburgh are:

• Caroline Heycock (leader)
• Peter Ackema
• Zakaris Svabo Hansen
• Antonella Sorace

Heycock & Sorace have been awarded a grant from the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) for a 3-year project on verb movement in contemporary Faroese, which began in September 2006. The project involves developing experimental methods and elicitation techniques to obtain quantitative measures of the grammaticality of variable phenomena for individuals of different ages and from different areas. As much as possible the materials will incorporate questions on phenomena that are under investigation by other groups in the ScanDiaSyn project. Zakaris Svabo Hansen is recruited as a research assistant in the project. Further details about the project can be found here.

Variation in Faroese, and the comparison of Faroese with other languages and dialects of Scandinavian is of particular interest to this group because of the known syntactic changes that have been taking place in this language in the recent past and present, in particular with respect to the position of finite verbs with respect to negation (a topic that is part of the research Ackema’s research program); but there are a number of other points of syntactic variation that have been pointed out. Other Scandinavian languages are known to have gone through similar changes, but in the more remote past; and English went through a related development. There is therefore a substantial body of comparative work; but Faroese offers the possibility of studying this type of syntactic change in the present and more recent past; an invaluable opportunity.

Group members: Heycock and Ackema are primarily theoretical syntacticians, with a background in Germanic; Sorace works on the acqusition of syntax. All have a particular interest in syntactic variation: Heycock and Ackema’s orientation to such variation is that of tracking syntactic changes through time (diachronic syntax), which necesssarily involves considering a body of language produced by multiple speakers; Sorace’s primary concern is variation within the individual. Both of these lines of inquiry converge, given two shared assumptions: that variation in the community typically involves also variation within individuals in the community, and that diachronic change proceeds because of systematic failures in transmission of grammars between generations of speakers.