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NORMS Fosen

From 20 to 23 September 16 linguists and assistants from the NORMS/ScanDiaSyn network conducted fieldwork on the Fosen peninsula just north of Trondheim.


View NORMS Fosen in a larger map

The fieldwork was organized by Kristin Melum Eide and Pål Kr. Eriksen at The Norwegian University for Science and Technology (NTNU). Eide is native to the municipality of Bjugn which along with Åfjord (Stokkøya) and Rissa (Skaugdalen) formed the three “dialectological sites” visited. The program for the fieldwork can be found on the NORMS homepage. Below the picture of the fieldwork crew and the map follow the blog entries written during and right after the event.

The NORMS Fosen crew of fieldworkers at Austrått Manor. (Photo: Hans Eide)

Måndag 21. september Arne, Åshild, Øystein, and Live ready to enter the caviar tube taking them to Fosen. (Photo: Björn Lundquist) 15 linguists have now come together in the Fosen peninsula just north of Trondheim, Norway, for a few days of intensive dialectological fieldwork. The Fosen dialect is semi-famous in the generative syntactic literature through references through anecdotal evidence (typically in footnotes) provided by Kristin M. Eide. Time had come to do something about this, i.e. turn anecdotes into more systematic studies, and Kristin was not hard to persuade when the idea of a NORMS fieldwork on her native dialect came up. Together with Pål Kr. Eriksen, Kristin has, on a rather short notice, put together a three day packed program with visits to equally many "dialectological sites" on Fosen, see this map. A good portion of the participating linguists arrived yesterday evening: together with Björn and the Oslo crew (Arne Martinus, Live, Åshild) I took the caviar tube from Oslo, a 18 seat aircraft where you had to bend your back while walking down the aisle, hence an experience in and of itself. The program started this morning at Mølnargarden, the "bygdetun” in Bjugn municipality, with Stian Hårstad of NTNU giving an overview dialect where he placed the dialect(s) of Fosen in relation to other Trøndelag dialects. The lecture was in fact well attended by locals which subsequently acted as our first informants. Right after Stian's lecture we commenced our investigations and spread out with our selected informants. We kept going until late lunchtime with recordings and questionnaires and interviews of sorts. View from Mt. Kopparn. (Photo: Tania Strahan) After lunch we went to various places of interest in Bjugn and Ørlandet, more precisely to the iron age burial mounds at Valseidet, to the mountain Kopparn, and finally to the manor Austrått, before returning to our base camp in Lysøysundet. Tomorrow we will go to Stokkøya in Åfjord municipality. The original plan was to go there on a RIB in 20 min, but heavy winds are forecasted, so we must resort to a 1:30 hrs drive instead. More contentful notes on the actual investigations here in Fosen are likely to appear tomorrow night after the scheduled debriefing. – Øystein   Tysdag 22. september The dialectological site of today's NORMS fieldwork in Fosen was Stokkøya in Åfjord municipality, a good two and a half hours drive from our base camp at Lysøysund. Pål and Kristin had organized for us to meet and talk to informants at Sydvesten Kro at 10 a.m. Exactly 11 local dialect speakers, four adolescents and seven adults, showed up to share of their intuitions and native speech with us 15 linguists: hence, not a balanced pairing of speakers vs. investigators, but several of us did in fact team up during the investigations. On the other hand, Sydvesten Kro was not very spacious, and as I was running a pre-recorded questionnaire on wh-questions, I ended up taking my selected informants out to Kristin's van where I could play off the questionnaire in a less noisy environment than inside the inn. During the sessions the informants sat in the driver's seat, I in the front passenger seat whereas André and Johanna were observing from the back seat. The data I have got so far on wh-questions and V2 is a bit chaotic. I'm a bit surprised as to the relative acceptance of complex wh-constituents with non-V2, but when eye-balling the results now, it at least seems that such cases on a whole are judged as less good as the V2 equivalents. Moreover, although most informants use the monosyllabic når (‘when’) and koss/kess (‘how (manner)’), these constituents are less well received with non-V2 than with V2, so if that turns out to hold more generally, it cannot be all phonology that's determining the grammar here. I've also been looking at wh-nominals, in particular the adnominal use of ‘manner how’, and on degree exclamatives. Concerning the former I've made a new detail observation, namely that elliptic wh-nominals can come out as koss ein (‘how one’), but crucially not as just *koss (when querying which one out of two or more). Concerning the latter, I have got some positive information on a kind of measureless degree exclamative that Kristin had told me about earlier, namely where the universal quantifier is followed by a determiner and a definite noun, for instance Ajllt de folke som va der! ‘All the people-DEF SOM was there!’. However, the North Norwegian construction with ‘what’ plus indefinite noun (Ka folk de va hær!) is generally rejected. Debriefing at Strandbaren, Hosen on Stokkøya. (Photo: Øystein A. Vangsnes) After our session at Sydvesten Kro we headed for Strandbaren, semi-famous for it's modern architecture and spectacular setting on a beach right on the shore of the North Atlantic. It turned out that the lunch order had escaped the Strandbaren people, but disaster was avoided by their sporty attitude: on short notice they prepared a lovely mussels dish with coriander and tomato, aioli and salty home baked foccaccia like bread which we had while the strong gail outside was whipping the rain towards the glass walls. The somewhat longer wait for our meal was exploited for a debriefing where each of us gave a short resumé of what we had been investigating. Some reports of this kind follow immediately below and more will follow later. – Øystein Notes from Pål Kr. Eriksen: Pål and Arne in the winds at Strandbaren. (Photo: Tania Strahan) I have been doing research on counterfactual conditionals and related phenomena (counterfactual similatives (‘as if X’) and future tense). According to the common, but as of yet superficial knowledge, the dialects of Trøndelag might be able to express counterfactuality with the present perfect, where standard Norwegian and many other varieties would use the past perfect. My research so far shows (as has been suspected among some linguists) that in fact the present perfect and past perfect tend to be formally identical, so it is not possible to identify the counterfactual form as one or the other. The auxiliary has the form ‘ha’ in both instances. The older informants generally all use this pattern. The younger informants, however, display much more variation. Some of them use the standard Norwegian (or Trondheim city dialect) construction with a clearly identifiable past perfect form (‘hadd’), but one of them seemingly has the legendary present perfect pattern – he had a clear [r] at the end of his counterfactual auxiliaries, making it similar to the expected present tense form. Unfortunately he also produced the same suffix when he was asked to form a (declarative) past perfect, so the proper analysis of his data is still a bit unclear. There were also other interesting data pertaining to the use of auxiliaries, but I’ll come back to the details later on. – Pål Notes from Tania Strahan: Tania Strahan in the hairy winds at Strandbaren (Øystein and Lars in the background)(Photo: Tania Strahan) Of all the NORMS fieldwork locations I have been, Fosen appears to have the clearest patterns with respect to long-distance reflexives (Jon seier at Maria elskar seg=Jon). Older people have LDR, and young people don't. LDR here is like Faroese, not like Icelandic: LDR is acceptable out of both complement and adjunct clauses (e.g. Jon likes Maria when she smiles at seg=Jon), and 1st and 2nd persons make LDR unacceptable. Finally, perspective effects show up: Jon veit at Maria er glad i sæ, but *Jon veit itj enno at Mara er glad i seg, as first reported by Moshagen and Trosterud 1990 for the Smøla dialect. I have also looked at dummy objects (Eg drøymer om DET å kunne fly), and it appears that older people generally reject these, while younger people are rather unsure, although they tend to reject them also. – Tania Notes from Björn Lundquist: Irene Franco and Björn Lundquist getting a laugh in Fosen. (Photo: Tania Strahan) I spent the last two days investigating adjective and participle agreement, and various other phenomena connected to participial syntax and semantics. What was most surprising was the variation among speakers when it came to something as basic/frequent as number/gender agreement on adjectives. Variation could be found within the very same location. On top of that, I also investigated (together with Irene) a number of phenomena related to the left periphery (choice of complementizers, use of resumptive pronouns etc.) . Some variation was found there as well, that seemed to be fairly systematic. One thing that was interesting was the fact that some speakers found V3-order in questions (ka du hete, kor du bor) highly marked, or ungrammatical, while other speakers found the V3-order more or less obligatory. The speakers favouring the V3-order also used the complementizer/relative pronoun som in subject extraction (hvem tror du som har gjort det), and they required a resumptive pronoun in other types of subject extraction contexts (Ole Gunnar vet jeg ikke om *(han) kommer "Ole Gunnar I don't know if comes"). Speakers with preferred V2-order in questions didn't allow som in subject wh-extraction, and they also rejected a resumptive pronoun in subject focus extractions (Ole Gunnar vet jag ikke om (*han) kommer). I must admit that it's quite surprising to find this amount of (systematic) variation within one and the same place – I'm almost starting to believe in Parameters! – Björn Notes from Arne M. Lindstad et al.: Assisted by the Trondheim-based MA-students Perlaug M. Kveen and Marianne Anderson, we have run through the standard ScanDiaSyn procedure at the two measure points Bjugn and Stokkøya. This involves four informants in each place, two below 30, and two above 50. We interview each informant for some 10-15 minutes, then put two and two together for a 20-30 minutes chat. Everything is recorded and filmed, and we take it back to Oslo for transcription, processing and inclusion in the NorDiaSyn corpus. We have also tried to push the standardised Norwegian version of the ScanDiaSyn questionnaire into the time schedule. In Bjugn, this was successful with the two older interviewees, but time pressure prevented us from doing this with the two youngest informants. On Stokkøya, informant fatigue made the questionnaire session rather unsuccessful. We're impressed with the number of informants having showed up at the locations, and are looking forward to the last recording session in Skaugdalen tomorrow! – Perlaug, Marianne, Live and Arne M Notes from Åshild Søfteland: Arne, Irene, and Åshild on top of Mt. Kopparn. (Photo: Tania Strahan) I love to be here on Fosen! The nature is so beautiful, even in bad weather. And all the meals we've had have been fantastic! I'm working on subject syntax/pragmatics, and here I've asked the informants about expletives, cleft constructions, clausal subjects in topic position and left dislocation of heavy subjects. On expletives, I tried sentences with weather verbs, presentation constructions, and passive sentences with transitive and intransitive verbs. As expected, all the informants use only det, never der or her. One interesting thing I noted today though, on Stokkøya, was that the oldest informants found sentences like Det vart dansa heile natta ('It was danced all night') and Det leika nån unga i hagen. ('It played some kids in the garden') totally fine and natural, while the younger women meant they hardly could say it like that. They didn't like I går vart det fonni goll på Stokkøya either, ('Yesterday it was found gold on Stokkøya'), even if this sentence is always a success semantically. I'll definitely look more in to this later. On the three other topics mentioned, I haven't found anything particularly different in the dialect here - also quite as expected. What I have found out, then, is that I have to ask the informants in another way to get the information I'm interested in. If I e.g. want to find out what is usually preferred of Det va mang så rømt ifrå fængselet ('It was many who escaped from the prison') and Mang rømt ifrå fængselet ('Many escaped from the prison'), or between Kæmm det va så kjørt tå veien i går? ('Who it was that drove off the road yesterday?') and Kæmm kjørt tå veien i går? ('Who drove off the road yesterday?'), I have to give the informants more context and more specific context than I did today. In addition, I asked the informants some lexical and morphological questions - for fun and because many informants get quite disappointed if they don't get to talk about this as well... So I found out, like Stian Hårstad said in the lecture on Monday, that the feminine singular nominative pronoun was hu in the south (Botngård) and ho further north (Stokkøya). I've also learnt that they have a lot of i-endings on Stokkøya, for instance most of them would say på skoLin ('at school'). – Åshild Notes from Tor Åfarli: Tor Åfarli at Strandbaren. (Photo: Tania Strahan) I inquired about the structure of noun phrases, especially the form and distribution of distal and proximal items like der 'there' and her 'here' in expressions like "den der bilen" 'the there car-DEF' and "den her bilen" 'the here car-DEF'. Also, definite distal and proximal items were investigated, like "derren" 'there-DEF' and "herren" 'here-DEF'. Furthermore, attributive adjectives in definite form were mapped, like "den storen" 'the big-DEF', meaning 'the big one'. – Tor   Fredag 25. september Kristin and Hans engaged in a duet. (Photo: Tania Strahan) The blog entry on Tuesday failed to mention that the second day of the Fosen fieldwork was closed off by a(nother) exquisite four course dinner at our base camp, Skippertunet in Lysøysund, and what's more, with some musical entertainment. Two girls from Botngård high school in Bjugn first sang a few ballads, and beautifully so, before Kristin and her husband Hans on keyboard carried on with songs like “Crazy”, “Cotton fields” and the like, after a while also to be joined with NTNU MA student Marianne who revealed her fine singing skills. But entertainment did not end there: urged by Kristin Tania entered the floor almost in karaoke fashion and sang a couple of tunes before also Irene jumped up and we eventually all sang along. Marianne entertaining the group with some singing. (Photo: Tania Strahan) After dinner things calmed down and a good number of the participants did their homework and dutifully produced notes for the blog, for you all to enjoy. The next day we sat out in the morning for Skaugdalen in Rissa municipality, the southernmost of our three dialectological sites. We arrived at the “bedehus” of the community at around 10 in the morning and met with about 10 local dialect speakers who were ready and keen to talk to us. We dispersed over the rooms available and again I resorted to using Kristin's van for the sessions with my informants, simply to be in a quiet environment where I could play off my pre-recorded questionnaire. My results are still a bit chaotic, but some patterns are emerging. What is striking, though, is that compared to the results we have previously obtained from North Norwegian dialects, in particular Senja, although many of the same test sentences are judged as degraded, there is in the Fosen data not an equally clear dismissal as in the northern judgments. So, for instance, by and large we see a simple vs. complex distinction as to acceptability of non-V2: complex wh-constituents + non-V2 (sometimes called "V3") generally come out as worse than the simple ones also in Fosen, but nevertheless almost never below the middle of the numeric scale. Øystein running his pre-recorded questionnaire on a Skaugdalen informant – in Kristin's car. (Photo: Irene Franco) This difference from northern dialects might simply mean that I didn't give good enough instructions as to the use of the scale (in Fosen), but it might also reflect a real difference between the dialects/dialect areas. In fact, given that on the one hand there are some individuals (typically younger ones) who find many of the complex cases quite OK (for instance Ka slags bøker like du bæst? ‘What kind of books do you like the most?’) and on the other that there are some individuals who give just as clear judgments as in the northern dialects (and strongly dislike the example just given), one could envisage that yet other individuals have a more “restrictive” northern grammar type, but recognizes the other type from their local linguistic experience and therefore don't dismiss the sentences in question altogether. In fact, several times I would hear informants say that “I don't think I would say it that way, but there are definitely other people who would". One issue worth mentioning concerns the complexity of wh-subjects and som-insertion. Now, it is quite clear that a simple wh-subject pronoun is preferably followed by som in matrix questions: the relevant test sentence gets a higher total score than the equivalent without som; Kæm (som) sæll feskeutstyr her i bygda? ‘Who SOM sells fishing gear here in this town?’. The scores are 7 (+som) vs. 5,1 (-som) on the 1-7 scale when I count the average of four informants from Stokkøya and four from Skaugdalen. With a full noun phrase the situation is reversed and the version without som gets a higher score; there is a tendency for this in the pair Kor mang elleva (som) tar skolbussn dit kvar dag, då? (6 vs. 6,6) and the tendency is more pronounced in the Kor mang elleva (som) reise tel Botngård kvar dag, då? (5,5 vs. 7). After the sessions at Skaugdalen bedehus we travelled to Råkvåg where we had our lunch. From there Leiv Inge and I split from the others and drove to Trondheim in time for me to catch a bus to the airport and get on the last flight back to Tromsø. The rest of the group would later in the evening have the pleasure of dining at Kristin and Hans' farm at Eide where rumours have it that the whole bunch engaged in some serious singing of DDE songs. – Øystein Notes from Christine Bjerkan Østbø: I investigated some issues related to the distribution of the negator itj, namely first and foremost pronoun shift (e.g. Han las itj a/Han las a itj ‘He read (it) not (it)’) and a few sentences with negative imperatives (itj færra/itj å færra/færra itj) and subordinate clauses (...som itj ongan ha hørt før/som ongan itj ha hørt før). After the fieldwork, the overall conclusion is: Everything can be said by some informants, but not every informant can say everything. Regarding pronoun shift my feeling so far is that there was a tendency among the informants in Stokkøya and Skaugdalen to have itj further to the right than among the informants in Bjugn. As for the other two things, I didn’t get the impression that there was any systematic difference between the places. – Christine Notes from Irene Franco: Along with Björn’s observations on Monday and Tuesday's results, on Wednesday we have also found a remarkable variation between younger and more aged informants with regard to different sorts of wh-extractions and licensing of subject gaps. While the young informants accept without problems a subject gap coreferential with the extraction forming a free relative clause (e.g. Såmmå kæm som æ e gift mæ me, kjæm æ tel å elsk (a/an), or Såmmå kæm som kjæm, e (a/n) velkommen), the older informants strongly reject sentences without a resumptive subject pronoun. In general, we found that the free relative construction consists of the sequence “Såmmå kæm som + verb” for subject free relatives and “Såmmå kæm (*som) + subject…verb” for non-subject free relatives. We found a age difference also in the use of SOM in this context: one young speaker does accept SOM insertion in an object free-relative, whereas her judgments follow the expected pattern as for wh-extractions out of embedded clauses, i.e. there is a complementary distribution of SOM and overt subjects (see Björn’s note). The older informants from Rissa (Skaugdalen) also appear to require SOM-insertion in subject question (e.g. Kæm *(som) kjæm); and allow non-inversion in Wh- questions (e.g. Ka du sier?), unless a cleft-construction is used (e.g. Ka e de du sier? vs. *Ka de e du sier?). The latter set of facts seems to support the hypothesis that V3-questions are the result of cleft-ellipsis in the variety spoken in Rissa. In contrast, the younger informants allow both inverted and uninverted patterns. There is definitely something to think about here… – Irene   Laurdag 26. september Like Øystein said at the end of his summary of the third day of the NORMS Fosen fieldwork, after the late lunch and the debriefing at Bryggekafeen in Råkvåg, the scientific part of the program was over, and the last non-scientific post on the same program was “dinner at Eide”, but before that the group dispersed for a few hours. Some went for a stroll around downtown Botngård, while others went back to Lysøysund for a bit of rest and, for some of the girls, a swim in the chill waters outside the apartments. Eventually we all gathered (at) Chez Eide, where we were served baccalao and apple pie and assorted refreshments, and the evening developed into singing, mostly of songs in various Trøndelag dialects. It was a very nice end to workshop! Tor and the MA students from NTNU had to leave early that evening, while the rest of us spent one last night at Lysøysund, before planes, busses and ferries took us to our respective destinations in the early morning hours of Thursday. Johanna Prytz with a Skaugdalen informant. (Photo: Irene Franco) We are generally quite pleased with the outcome of the workshop. First of all, it attracted a lot more participants than we had expected as organizers. We had imagined a total number of appr. 12 linguists in attendance, but we ended up being 16! No doubt the “commercial announcement” Øystein got out for us at the Grand Meeting in Älvdalen in August helped in that respect. Also the number of informants was higher than we would have hoped, especially on Stokkøya and in Skaugdalen, but as we have experienced at all the former NORMS fieldwork trips, people are in general proud of their local dialects, and are just happy and eager to help us documenting more of it. The exact scientific results of the workshop can be read about in the workshop reports made by the individual participants (cf. previous blog entries), and more will follow in the Fosen folder in the “Dokumentkista” for others in the project to look at and use – and, for sure, in the planned future volume about the syntax of Trøndersk/Central Norwegian! – but to briefly summarize the general impressions, it seems that many of us found clear distinctions between the speech of older and younger informants, at times with more variation among the latter. This might be attributed to a larger degree of regional centralization in the speech of younger informants, which in the case of Fosen speakers would mean an attraction towards the Trondheim dialect, but this is just an idea at the moment. In any case, be they young or old, the informants provided a mass of exciting dialect data, so just stay tuned to the NORMS/ScanDiaSyn channel for more details and research results as we get them! The NORMS Fosen crew of fieldworkers at Austrått Manor. (Photo: Hans Eide) In social respects it was also a very successful workshop. Some of the planned events had to be cancelled, or came out a bit worse off than they could have, due to weather conditions, but, on the other hand, the infamous rough weather of the Norwegian North-West coast line was actually a part of the more spectacular experiences at times, as when we could witness the stormy wind in full action around us while sitting warm and comfy eating mussels in Strandbaren at Stokkøya. Big thanks are due to the people working backstage for us on these social happenings, like Siv and Signe who prepared and served multi-coursed gourmet dinners for us in the evenings and hearty breakfasts in the mornings, the people at Strandbaren who helped us out at the spur of the moment, the host and hostess of the apartments at Lysøysund , the hosts and hostesses of the different fieldwork venues, the guides who showed us around at Mølnargården and Austrått on Monday, Kristin’s husband and sons, who drove us hither and thither and made baccalao and music, and many others! Finally, a big thank you to the participating researchers and assistants, for attending this workshop, and thus making it a scientific and social success! – Pål