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NORMS Føroyar

From 8–16 August 2008 NORMS and NLVN organized a combined field trip and methods course in the Faroe Islands. The activity was organized in close collaboration between the Icelandic NORMS/NLVN group and local linguists at Froðskaparsetur Føroya (The University of the Faroe Islands). The program and various other information can be found at the NORMS homepages. Below follow the relevant blog entries that were written during and after the activity, extracted from the blog archive and ordered chronologically. Part I Part II Index of individual reports The group by the eastern landing at Viðareiði. (Photo: Terje Heiestad, Millimeterpress) The following news items have appeared in relation to the fieldwork: Fra Fuglafjørður til dialektdatabase (‘From Fuglafjørður to dialect database’), article on the NORMS field work in the Faroe Islands and the Nordic dialect corpus in NordForsk Magasin 2008:2, 12–15, October 2008. Ligner på nordnorsk (‘Resembles Northern Norwegian’), interview with Kristine Bentzen about the similarities between Faroese and Northern Norwegian, Labyrint 2008:3, 36–37, October 2008. Språkvandring på Færøyene (‘Language hike in the Faroe Islands’), reportage from the NORMS field work in the Faroe Islands, August 2008, in Labyrint 2008:3, 34–35, October 2008. Samkjørte språkforskere (‘Coordinated linguists’), article in Nordic Research Gems: Success stories from NORIA – the Nordic Research and Innovation Area, NordForsk, October 2008. Leygardagur 9. augúst The combined NORMS fieldwork and NLVN seminar in the Faroe Islands has commenced. View Larger Map Most people arrived in the islands yesterday, some of the non-local organizers a few days before that, and the official start was a reception at Føroyamálsdeildin last night. The local organizers have done a great job in preparing everything for the event. Most of the participants are housed in various buildings of the hostel in Tórshavn and the seminar part takes place in the building of Starvsmannafelagið (the Union). Helge Sandøy poses a pertinent question. (Photo: Øystein A. Vangsnes) Today and tomorrow and half of Monday the program will be filled with lectures on various aspects of Faroese as well as lectures on methodology. For the methodology part we have invited Bert Vaux (Cambridge), Carson Schütze (UCLA), Caroline Heycock (Edinburgh), and Helge Sandøy (Bergen), and the latter two are also actively researching the Faroese language. First out today, though, were Kristján Árnason and Hjalmar P. Petersen who gave a comparative overview of Faroese phonology (mainly compared to Icelandic). Helge Sandøy and Jógvan í Lon Jacobsen then continued with a presentation of Faroese morphology and historical phonology, shifting the point of comparison more towards (Mainland) Scandinavian. After lunch Bert Vaux gave a lecture on field methods with special emphasis on phonology and morphology, and today's program was rounded off by a presentation of Faroese names by Kristin M. Magnussen. The unofficial program will presumably be rounded off at Café Natúr or some other appropriate venue... - Øystein Sunnudagur 10. augúst Victoria Absalonsen helping Einar Freyr Sigurðsson and Caroline Heycock with Faroese examples. (Photo: Tania Strahan) The workshop continued today with an initial presentation of Faroese and Scandinavian loan words by Jógvan í Lon Jacobsen followed by an overview of Faroese syntax by Höskuldur Thráinsson and Zakaris Svabo Hansen. After lunch Carson Schütze lectured on the Empirical Basis of Syntax (and Semantics), before Zakaris gave an overview of Faroese dialects. The final item on the program was a talk on Faroese on negative and polarity sensitive indefinites in Faroese by Arne Martinus Lindstad. (Arne Martinus' handout can be found here.) After and in between the various presentations there have been ample opportunities and time for questions and discussion, and the group is gradually homing in on issues to investigate during the upcoming fieldwork. We have charted the research topics of the participants and identified overlapping areas of interest. Some of the issues to be examined are (broadly put): negation, (embedded) word order (V-to-I), case, binding, expletives, psychological distal demonstratives, possessive constructions, extraction, gender, r-allophones, expressions for sunshower, wh-nominals, exclamatives. - Øystein Mánadagur 11. augúst: Part of Tórshavn harbour with Tinganes. (Photo: Tania Strahan) The third day of the Faroese workshop is over and has now gone over to a new phase: actual fieldwork! We started the day with two more presentations at Starvsmannafelagið, one by Helge Sandøy and Hjalmar Petersen on sociolinguistic aspect of Faroese and another by Caroline Heycock on magnitude estimation. Then, after lunch, several tenfolds of informants met us at Føroyamálsdeildin and stayed willingly with us to answer our many questions about their language. The informants were distributed and circulated among the linguists during a four hour long session. The day ended by a after-dinner debrief where some of the experiences and thoughts from the first day were discussed. Things are going very well, it seems! Furthermore, medial interest is building up. Our presence in the Faroes was mentioned in the radio news yesterday, and today the Faroese television showed up both at Starvsmannafelagið and during the fieldwork session. Moreover, a journalist from the University of Tromsø magazine, Labyrint, joined us yesterday evening and will follow us over the next few days. In addition to that we'll be followed tomorrow by a journalist and a photographer who are assigned by NordForsk to write a couple of articles related to the Scandinavian dialect syntax enterprise. That's pretty good, too, I would say! - Øystein Mikudagur 13. augúst Kristine and Piotr enjoying the puffin dinner at Viðareiði. (Photo: Øystein A. Vangsnes) Yesterday was an eventful and exiting day. We left Tórshavn early in the morning and went north. The rain was pouring and the hillsides full of white stripes from all the flowing creeks as the bus took us to Fuglafjørður where our morning field session took place. Well over thirty informants had showed up at the town school and were happy to ask all our many questions about their language. After lunch we continued through the brand new subsea tunnel from Eysturoy to Borðoy over to Kalksvík where our afternoon field session took place, also this time at the school and again with well over thirty willing informants. Although the weather is completely uninteresting as far as our tasks are concerned, it feels important to mention that a precipitation record (I don't know exactly by which definition) was broken this day in the Klaksvík area. Luckily we stayed inside all the time... After the session in Klaksvík we continued even further north to Viðareidi, Victoria Absalonsen's hometown, where we had dinner at the local restaurant. We were served lovely puffin and had a great time, so great that it was difficult to wrap up and head home again. Eventually we did, and arrived back in Tórshavn just before midnight. Lopra from up above (Photo: Gunnar Hrafn Hrafnbjargarson) I'm sure most people went straight to bed: We had another early rise today to be in time for the ferry to Suðuroy which left at 8.30. And the day today has by no means been any less exiting than yesterday. A very noticable difference was the weather – today there was no rain, and in fact quite sunny for the latter part of the day. We arrived in Tvøroyri at 10.30 and had a three hour field work session there before lunch. After lunch we were taken on an excursion to the southern part of Suðuroy, with stops at Sumba and on the mountain up above. The views were marvellous. Lots of people were out exploiting the good weather to secure the hay harvest. On the return trip to Tórshavn we had a very tasteful dinner on board the ferry. By Beinisvørð (Photo: Gunnar Hrafn Hrafnbjargarson) I will leave the Faroe Islands tomorrow morning and therefore miss the remaining two days of field work. But the four sessions so far have given me quite some interesting data about Faroese. I have mainly studied wh-nominals, some related wh-matters, and exclamatives plus some wh-extraction issues having to do with ±presence of various complementizers. Unlike Icelandic Faroese has retained inflected what as a wh-determiner, as in for example Hvønn bil eigur tú? ‘What-ACC car own you?’. At the same time the language has acquired a "what for (a)" determiner. For some speakers at least it seems that the former triggers a token reading whereas the latter is neutral wrt. the type/token distinction. On the other hand there is no adnominal use of "how" (hvussu) as in Icelandic and many Mainland Scandinavian varieties: no speaker accepted Hvussu bil hevur tú? ‘How car do you have?’. One interesting thing concerning the wh-extraction issue, is that I have found speakers who accept insertion of the relative complementizer ið when the fronted wh-constituent is the subject of the embedded clause. Such insertion is however not accepted with wh-object, and this then parallels data well-known from Norwegian dialects concerning som-insertion. Moreover, Faroese seems to have a sharp *that-trace effect: no speakers accepted Hvør heldur tú at hefur gørt tað? (‘Who do you think that did it?’). I'm sure other people have found loads of other interesting stuff, some of which may be mentioned here in the coming days and which will materialize in future publications. Stay tuned! - Øystein The group at Beinisvørð, Suðuroy. (Photo: Katrine Ziesler) Hósdagur 14. augúst Koltur seen from the Sandoy ferry. (Photo: Caroline Heycock) Although not all of us managed to wake up on time Thursday morning, we left Tórshavn around 7:30 for Gamlarætt, where we took the boat over to Sandoy. In the school in Sandur we met our informants. The weather was magnificent, sunny and warm. After three hours of intense data collecting, we went to Fjallastovan where we were served delicious lunch: soup with meat and wheat balls as starter, true Norwegian karbonade as main course, and a rhubarb soufflé for desert. Øystein had left so he could not experience the first Faroese informants that did not have a sharp *that-trace effect. In Sandur, Kristine and I also found the first informants to reject extraction from a non-subject initial V2 clause. My informants also reacted more strongly against verb movement in embedded questions than informants elsewhere. After lunch we went to see the local art museum in Sandur. During lunch, Janne realized that she had been surrounded by Icelandic informants which she could have used to record spoken Icelandic. She rigged up her gear in a side room at the art museum, and managed to record approx. 1 and a half hour of Icelandic linguists slandering each other while the rest of the group wandered around in the local grave yard where archaeologists were digging up a building from the viking age. On the way home, people protested against having a debriefing session upon arrival in Tórshavn. Noone, however, protested against having a party so we gathered in Føroyamálsdeildin for some delicious food, including dried lamb (skerpikjøt), dried fish (turrur fiskur) and blubber (spik). Tonight, we also danced traditional Faroese chain dance (dansur) accompanied by three men from the local dance association. As we danced, they sang parts of four dance songs (kvæði), Ólavur Riddararós, Ormurin langi, Flóvin Bænadiktsson, and Sinklars vísa. – Gunnar Hrafn Tania Strahan at Beinisvørð (Photo: Jeffrey Parrott) Well, well, well! Until today, I had had the feeling that I was collecting data from a single language (which has not been my experience in Norway or Vestjylland). Practically everone in the first four Faroese places we visited gave identical or fvery similar judgements on long-distance binding, which can be summarised as follows: binding permitted over non-finite and finte complement clause boundary (like Icelandic); binding permitted across an inanimate subject of a relative clause (like Norwegian and Vestjysk, but unlike Icelandic); binding permitted across animate subjects of relative clauses (unlike both Norwegian and Icelandic, but similar to Vestjysk Danish); BUT binding not permitted EVER across a first or second person pronoun. Today in Sandoy, neither 2 nor 3 applied: Sandoy LDR is like Icelandic LDR!!* * Except that it still cannot occur across a first or second person pronoun. - Tania Leygardagur 16. augúst Yesterday, the few people that hadn't left already gathered in Starvsmannafelagshúsinum to listen to Hjalmar and Philipp's two talks on gender in Faroese. After lunch, we then headed for our final field work destination in the Faroe Islands, the island Vágar. Here, we lodged into the local school of Miðvágur where our informants soon showed up. The proportion of informants per interviewer had changed significantly from the previous days. This time, we could allow ourselves the luxury of interviewing two or more informants at a time. I continued to elicitate data for Øystein, but I didn't find much differences from the day before, although the Vágar-informants didn't accept the Icelandic "what"-type questions and exclamatives as easily as the informants in Sandoy. I also continued to ask about verb movement and extraction, and here too, the informants did not have so much against verb movement across adverbs (other than negation and negative adverbs). The answeres I got on the extraction data were not as confirming or reassuring ... at that time it still was a mystery to me why the informants didn't dislike these examples. When the informants had left we drove to the airport hotel where we were served (Icelandic) mouton. Tonight became a late night for some of us too. As for myself, I was so upset by the extraction facts that I didn't fall asleep until 3 o'clock in the morning, to wake up at 5 for the bus. Fortunately, on the way to the airport, the solution came to my mind ... something to pester you with in Sandbjerg. Farvæl Føroyar! Takk til øll tykkum sum møttu upp! Ansa eftir tykkum! – Gunnar Hrafn The whole group of linguists under the fog after dinner at Viðareiði. (Photo: Terje Heiestad, Millimeterpress ©) Søndag 17. august Piotr Garbacz, Lund University (Photo: Caroline Heycock) After having come back to Sweden from a fantastic workshop on the Faroe Islands (many thanks to the organizers!), I want to write a couple of words about my investigation regarding verb movement to I° in relative clauses and on Stylistic Fronting (SF). The data I collected are quite coherent and I have the impression that my (generally young) informants have a very similar intuition. It seems that they have lost verb movement across negation, but that they may have verb movement across certain type of lower adverbs, e.g. across the adverb ’ofta’ (’often’). Stylistic fronting also seems to be restricted in the speech of young Faroese to certain constituents that can be fronted, whereas other cannot. Although I haven’t looked at the data more extensively yet, my feeling is that SF in Faroese is much more restricted that the standard descriptions of the language claim. Moreover, as I can see there is no (or a very small) geographic difference in the judgements. - Piotr Miðvikudagur 20. ágúst Individual reports from NORMS field work in the Faroe Islands: Part I Below follow four individual reports from participants at the Faroese fieldwork last week. From Hjalmar Petersen: I gave two talks: Faroese-Danish bilingualism and Gender Assignment in Modern Faroese. In addition to this I collected together with P. Conzett material on gender. We concentrated on finding evidence for three semantic rules: fish are m. or f., birds are m. or f., and trees are m. or f. In doing so, we had 3 nonsense words and different sentences. The result so far is, that the test confirms my findings, that is, that the 3 semantic assignment rules are real. Together with Jógvan í Lon-Jacobsen I collected material on comparatives, i.e. sjúkari : meira sjúkur and meira sjúkari, where we included the last one (actual sentence from the spoken language), as a proof that language replication is not mere copying. We also collected material on two ditransitive verbs: geva 'to give' and selja 'to sell'. We wanted to see if animacy plays a role in the change from NP-dat, NP-acc. to PP + NP. I also included sentences with hvaðani 'whence', hvaðani ... frá 'whence ... from' and hvar ... frá 'where...from'. Again the hypothesis is that replication is not mere copying (hvaðani ... frá). That is: We have a language contact situation on the Faroe Islands, where there is a fusion between Danish and Faroese (giva + PP + NP), and where there is language replication: hvaðani ... frá, meira ... sjúkari. In addition to this, we wanted to see if the de-volitative construction is spreading in Faroese. Again, a typical spread in lg. contact. That is, we wanted to see if people did use vil where the intended meaning is ætlar. Our findings here was quite straight forward. Our informants did not accept such spreading. - Hjalmar Corroborative evidence: "to smoke or not to smoke..." (Photo: Caroline Heycock) From Arne Martinus Lindstad: Following up on my talk Sunday evening (there is a link to the handout from Øystein's posting on Sunnudagur 10. augúst), I tested the distribution of the negative polarity item nakar 'any' as a singular determiner in various contexts. The distribution appears to be more or less identical to the distribution of the Norwegian singular determiner noen 'any'. Some licensing contexts were rejected by individual speakers, but this did not follow any dialectal divide. I also tested four sentences with negated imperatives and infinitives, varying the order of verb and negation. All informants accepted the order ikki > VInf, none accepted VInf > ikki. The young informants preferred negation initial imperatives, while the older ones preferred the order VImp > Neg. There was some variation with the imperatives, but again only at the idiolectal level. So I found no dialectal variation, perhaps as expected for these phenomena. - Arne Martinus From Bert Vaux: Ultra-brief resume: I found that, contrary to expectation, 5 of the 6 Suðuroy speakers I worked with applied vowel lengthening before ptk + jr and pk + l, at least in the vowels I checked. I was intrigued by Þráinsson et al's statement (2004:345-6; also Hammershaimb and Jakobsen 1891 according to Þráinsson et al. 2004:343) that their rule V(+stress) --> V: / _ C1 (p. 30) applies before ptk + jr and pk + l except in Suðuroy, so for example nakrar 'some-f.pl.' --> Suðuroy nag:rar but elsewhere nεagrar or nεa:hkhrar. This raises several questions, such as: The famous Finnish game “Joka” explained by a Klaksvík pupil. Click picture for a transcription and a translation! (MMS photo: Øystein A. Vangsnes) --Does the participation of clusters like kr in the lengthening rule result from the rule involving straightforward open-syllable lengthening + final consonant extraprosodicity? If so, (i) why do most licit word-initial clusters (gr, sn, etc.) *not* trigger lengthening medially, and (ii) does this entail that Suðuroy differs from the other Faroese varieties in never employing Onset Maximisation (so that e.g. /-VkrV-/ --> Suðuroy -Vk.rV- but -V.krV- elsewhere)? --Were there any other clusters not mentioned by Þráinsson et al. that trigger vowel lengthening? --Is the non-application of vowel lengthening in Suðuroy connected to the fact that it geminates consonants in this position rather than preaspirating them as in most of the other islands? (Þráinsson et al. 2004:346) --How does vowel lengthening interact with other factors, such as morphological structure, nativeness, etc.? Would the a in stavrím 'alliteration' (from stav-rím) lengthen, for example? "Watch out for waves and slippery concrete!" At the Sumba landing. (Photo: Øystein A. Vangsnes) In order to investigate this area I first attempted to determine the basic inventory of pronounceable initial, medial, and final consonant clusters, which turned out to be enormous. I then tried to confirm the following with speakers on the northern islands: (i) do they in fact lengthen in the environments described in Þráinsson et al? (ii) how do they syllabify words like nakrar? For task (i) I focused on vowels that display clear quality alternations when lengthened or shortened: a æ á ó ú ey. For task (ii) I employed a number of popular syllable division tasks, such as asking speakers to insert pauses inside words, pronounce words backwards, insert -pa- after every syllable, and so on. Some results: i. Speakers (including on Suðuroy!) generally lengthened a æ á ó ú ey before the Þráinsson clusters, including when these clusters were interrupted by prefix and compound boundaries. The only systematic exception was our friend Kristin Magnussen, who hails from Hov(i); her total lack of lengthening would make Höski proud. The other six Suðuroyans I interviewed all had lengthening in most or all of the words I tested. ii. This did not hold for the Suðuroy place name Lopra, which everyone I asked pronounced with a short o. Zakaris informed me, though, that everyone on every island pronounces this particular word with a short o! It's not clear to me at the moment whether this is because place names retain their local pronunciation across islands (which, judging from the pronunciation of Viðareiði, is unlikely), or non-derived environments work differently, or different vocalic subsets behave differently, or something else. I am left wishing I had tested all of the vowels instead of just the ones where I could hear the length alternations clearly, but that will have to wait for a native speaker or at least someone with a better ear than I have. iii. As I expected from the book description (though not from finding (i) above), Suðuroy speakers treated ptk + jr and pk + l clusters heterosyllabically, whereas most non-Suðuroy speakers treated them tautosyllabically. Everyone everywhere treated clusters such as st, sn, vr, etc. heterosyllabically in medial position, even though they are allowed word-initially. iv. To refresh the palate I also inquired about expressions for the sunshower (when it rains while the sun is shining). Most speakers couldn't think of anything relevant, but did recognise terradroppar once I mentioned it. (This expression apparently refers to a light rain or mist that isn't enough to get the hay racks wet.) One informant from Tórshavn, Hogni, produced a form vatnskin that noone else knew. v. I also found some regional variation in words for 'pinkie', the little finger! I found the Faroes to be an amazing place and the Faroese people to be incredibly gracious and helpful. (Special thanks to Victoria, Jógvan, Kristin, and Zakaris for going out of their way to help me!) I would love to return and investigate the lengthening dilemma in more detail, concentrating on the different villages on Suðuroy. And for my distractor question I think I'll ask what people call the gunk that gathers in the corner of one's eye after one has been sleeping--usually reveals some nice regional and idiolectal variation... - Bert From Ásgrímur Angantýsson: I investigated topicalization, stylistic fronting, verb/adverb placement and transitive expletives in embedded clauses, using a questionnaire containing 100 sentences (mostly minimal pairs). In most cases I tested the informants (48 in total) individually, which gave me an opportunity to ask them about the use and pragmatics of these word order phenomena. I have not analyzed the results in any detail yet, but here are some preliminary comments: (1) Embedded topicalization seems to obey similar restrictions in Faroese to those in Icelandic and the Mainland Scandinavian languages. (2) Subject-initial embedded V2 always receives more negative judgments than the V3 order, but the acceptance rate of strings like subject-auxiliary-'not'/'never'/'always' is very high in complements of verbs like 'say' and 'think'. (3) There appear to be many interesting complications to be dissected and inspected with respect to stylistic fronting and expletive insertion, which I will report on later. - Ásgrímur Fredag 20. august Individual reports from NORMS field work in the Faroe Islands: Part II Three more individual reports from the Faroese fieldwork follow below: From Caroline Heycock: In this visit I was doing a couple of different things. First, I very much enjoyed the opportunity to consult in particular with Kristine, Gunnar and Piotr about the nature of IP-internal verb movement in Faroese. In the preliminary results from the study that I'm doing with Antonella Sorace and Zakaris Svabo Hansen (and that I presented briefly in my talk about Magnitude Estimation) we found that although a high position for the verb was always dispreferred, this effect was strongest for the negative marker "ikki"; speakers were less reluctant to allow the verb to precede the two adverbs that we tested ("kanska" and "ofta"). So I was very pleased that Kristine, Gunnar, and Piotr would be looking at this question in the questionnaires that they were using. We also took examples sentences that we have included in our Magnitude Estimation tasks for testing the possibility of extracting out of clauses with non-subject-initial V2 and with Verb-Negation orders and included them in the questionnaire that Gunnar and Kristine used; this way it may be possible to compare the kind of results got from a 5-point scale and from the ME technique, when the materials are held (more or less) constant. Missing agreement (Photo: Gunnar Hrafn Hrafnbjargarson) A quite separate question that I am interested in is how different languages resolve the potential agreement conflict in copular sentences like "The only problem is his parents" where the initial phrase is singular and the final one plural. In English there is a strong preference for agreement to the left in this case, in German a strong preference for agreement to the right; in Dutch however speakers are very variable. In Icelandic also preliminary inquiries suggested that there is a degree of variability, and that at least some speakers distinguish between cases where "be" is the finite verb (and the post-verbal phrase could be in the "subject" position), and those in which, for example, a modal is included. So I distributed a fill-in-the blanks questionnaire to find out speakers' initial preferences, and then collected a small amount of judgment data to try to get at the distinction between dispreferred and ungrammatical. - Caroline From Carson Schütze: Carson Schütze lecturing in Tórshavn. (Photo: Jeffrey Parrott) Since I was unable to prepare my own elicitation materials (and Tolli and Jóhannes were already asking about issues involving case that were of primary interest to me), I sat in on some other people's sessions and tried to make helpful methodological observations/suggestions. Here are some that might be of somewhat general interest, from sitting in with Jeff Parrott, who was eliciting data on case marking in (what I have characterized in previous work as) potential default case environments, e.g. coordination, left dislocation, elliptical answers, copular sentences. Helge Sandøy also contributed significantly to these sessions. After running Jeff's questionnaire on numerous speakers, I think we jointly arrived at these conclusions: 1. These reader/speakers found it a bit difficult to read sentences printed in all capital letters, since this is not how they are used to reading (on paper at least). 2. Those who were not very strong readers tended to guess at parts of sentences rather than reading what was on the page, especially when it came to inflections. Hence it seems crucial with such a population to have speakers read each sentence out loud before they render a judgment, to make sure they're judging the sentence you want them to. 3. In some cases, their knowledge of syntax would cause even good readers to mis-read words (or perhaps assume there were typos) rather than perceive a grossly ungrammatical structure. For example, the accusative pronoun "Hana" was consistently misread as a proper name "Hanna" in sentence-initial position, where nominative was expected. Again, reading out loud should catch such problems. 4. The importance of finding out why speakers are rejecting a sentence was nicely illustrated by this observation: We were interested in case matching effects in pseudo-clefts, but it turned out that a number of examples were being rejected because some speakers strongly disliked the use of an overt relative particle ("sum"), independent of case marking. 5. On one data-set Jeff asked speakers a version of a question that was discussed after my talk: He said "Do you think any Faroese person would ever say these sentences?" The answers were extremely consistent ("No"), just like speakers' own judgments of the same sentences. Interestingly, though, when he asked whether these were the kinds of errors that children make, answers were all over the map: many people said Yes, often identifying particular errors they believed they had heard children make [not always the same ones], while others confidently said No. It is interesting to ponder how their exposure to child speech might compare to their exposure to speech from other dialects, in trying to understand this contrasting behavior. 6. On another data set (where judgments were much more variable), there were several instances where a speaker would accept a sentence as presented, but then when asked if they could also accept a variant with a different case marking on the critical word, they would say something like "Oh yes, it should be dative, not nominative", perhaps overriding their intuitive reaction with a prescriptive generalization. I don't think such responses can be meaningfully interpreted. The implication would be [contra my advice to Einar] that when you want to compare reactions to minimal pairs it may NOT be a good idea to present them side by side, at least not if there's any chance your speakers have conscious knowledge about the property you're contrasting. - Carson From Pål Kr. Eriksen: Pål Kr. Eriksen, University of Helsinki. (Photo: Caroline Heycock) I have been looking at expletive subjects in Faroese, more specifically the possibility to drop expletive subjects in particular contexts. From Icelandic it is known that a sentence which otherwise requires an expletive subject, will leave this subject out if the sentence-initial topic position is filled by some other phrase. While this is a mandatory operation in Icelandic, the literature on Faroese claims that in the latter language it is optional. I have checked how optional this operation really is, and the data I have collected clearly show that informants have intuitions about when to perform this operation and when not to, undermining the proclaimed optionality. I have not analysed the data in depth yet, but so far the data seem to indicate that expletives are more often left out if A) the fronted phrase is a locative adverbial and/or a “low” adverbial rather than a “high” adverbial, and/or if B) the fronted topic is contrasted with another fronted topic in a similar type of sentence, and/or if C) the type of expletive-rendering sentence is an existential sentence rather than a meteorological sentence. - Pål (The NORMS Forøyar blog continues here.)