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NORMS fieldwork in Norra Österbotten (Northern Ostrobothnia)
Laurdag 3. juni
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| Lars Huldén lecturing about the Northern Ostrobothnian dialects for NORMS (Photo: Øystein A. Vangsnes) |
Reporting from Jakobstad, Northern Ostrobothnia, Finland: We're done with the first day of the first NORMS dialect workshop, we being Jan-Ola Östman, Lars-Olof Delsing, Henrik Jørgensen, Christine Bjerkan Østbø, Madeleine Halmøy, Kristine Bentzen, and myself. It's been quite exiting. Today and tomorrow are in a way just preparation for the "real fieldwork" to be conducted on Monday through Wednesday, but already now quite a lot of information has emerged. The day started with a good two hour session with the professor emeritus, dialectologist, and poet Lars Huldén who spoke about the dialects in the area before submitting to our rounds of questions about various syntactic and morphosyntactic phenomena concerning them and in particular his own Munsala dialect. Later we met with two younger students/informants, Anna Saarukka and Linda Huldén, speakers of the Nedervetil and Jakobstad dialects, respectively, and questioned them in a similar fashion. Several insteresting patterns emerged and we are eager to continue our investigations the coming days - stay tuned for reports! (A couple of apertizers: No object shift in these dialects, a very messy pattern concerning the use of the definite suffix in "non-definite" contexts, possibly obligatory/preference for "split exclamatives" (and split wh-determiners generally), a sentence final negative polarity marker…) The sessions have been videotaped!
-Øystein
Sundag 4. juni
Second day of the NORMS dialect workshop. We were joined by Lisa Södergård, who speaks the Vörå dialect of Mid Österbotten, and who will act as an assistant during the fieldwork. We had a morning session were we continued preparing the fieldwork, basically deciding which topics to focus on and setting up some questionnaires. Kristine and Christine will take care of the verb movement and adverb placement issues, including Object Shift, whereas Lars-Olof, Madeleine, and I will investigate article syntax plus exclamatives and wh-determiners. Henrik will look into case marking on pronouns. Jan-Ola and Lisa will help out and otherwise take care of more general recordings and so forth.
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| At Hembygdsgården, Terjärv |
After noon we we’re taken on a tour in the municipality of Kronoby, offered to us by the mayor himself, Stig Östdahl. Our guide was Håkan Wikström, former head of Kronoby Gymnasium, now retired; a very informed and open-minded local historian and hobby archeologist. After lunch at Maggies Grillcafé we were taken to Terjärv where we met with some locals at the village musem and got to hear some real Terjärv dialect. Terjärv is one of three former distinct communities that were merged in 1969 to form the present Kronoby municipality in 1969. The other two are Nedervetil and Kronoby (proper), and after Terjärv we drove through Nedervetil to Kronoby where we had coffee at the former vicarage at Torgare, now a local museum, offered to us by people from the trust for the museum. Dialectologically speaking the Nedervetil vernacular groups with the Karleby dialect (and was formerly a part of that municipality), and we’ll return to both Kronoby and Nedervetil on Monday to do some serious fieldwork.
-Øystein
Måndag 5. juni
Third day of the NORMS dialect workshop in Northern Österbotten. Today we went to Kronoby and Nedervetil to do fieldwork. We arrived in Kronoby at around 8:30 and went to the “gubbdagis” at Snåres kafé, famous for its “grisar” (traditional jam-filled pastry), where we sat down with the old men who regularly meet there for morning coffee. After a bit of small talk we started interviewing them on the basis of our pre-prepared questionnaires. Lars-Olof, Madeleine, and I had a group of four informants and asked them about noun phrase structure plus some more.
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| At Snåres Kafé, Kronoby (Photo: Øystein A. Vangsnes) |
As predicted they have singular nouns after numerals and ‘many’, but singular definite after ‘much’ and also classifier-like expressions like ‘a glass N’. Adjectival modification of mass and type expressions does crucially not lead to insertion of the preadjectival, lexical article—an important piece of information! There were also other interesting results, but I’ll leave that for more comprehensive reports... Kristine tried out V-to-I movement, but has so far not succeeded in finding any Kronoby speakers that conform to the picture reported world-wide in the literature... Well, she succeeded better in neighboring Nedervetil!
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| Christine Bjerkan Østbø doing fieldwork in Nedervetil (Photo: Øystein A. Vangsnes) |
In Nedervetil, after visiting a fur producer (the fur industry is the pride of the community), we met some Nedervetil speakers at the local “Hembygdsgård” and got to interview them (and drink loads of coffee and eat marvellous cakes). Nedervetil (and Karleby) is famous for its lack of gender, and concerning the noun phrase structure the most fascinating finding we did (in my opinion), concerned a morpheme normally thought of as adjectival inflection: now, it turns out that it only appears on the last adjective in coordinated adjectives, and what’s more it can also appear on ‘for’ in what for constructions, in fact even on ‘kind’ in what kind (of) structures. Moreover, it is in complementary distribution with the indefinite article which can otherwise appear in the same position and it cannot appear in the plural. This is pretty cool! (Brings to mind Swiss German...)
On a methodological note the visit to Nedervetil was more rewarding than the one in Kronoby. The setting in Kronoby was more noisy and the informants were of more ‘varied quality’, as it were... Tomorrow we’ll visit a home for elderly people in Larsmo where we’ll meet not only old people, and then we’ll move on to Karleby. More to come...
-Øystein
Onsdag 7. juni
The NORMS dialect workshop on the Northern Österbotten dialects is now over. Lars-Olof and Madeleine left the group yesterday morning whereas the rest of us started the day by going to Larsmo Åldringshem where we in addition to some older speakers from the place also found a couple of younger informants from other municipalities further to the south in Österbotten who were working there. I started by interviewing three ladies two of which were well over 90 years old (95, 92, and 89). It was quite fun, actually, not the least to notice how they appreciated my interest in their vernacular.
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| Three grand old ladies in Larsmo (Photo: Øystein A. Vangsnes) |
These were actually the first ones to partly report of using the definite suffix on nouns after verbs like play (‘play guitar-the’, ‘play football-the’) and in expressions like have fever (‘have fever-the’), which we had on our questionnaire to investigate the range of “extraordinary” uses of definiteness (from a standard Scandianvian point of view, that is). The Larsmo dialect is crucially not like Nedervetil/Karleby and does have gender marking.
After lunch by one of the many bridges that connects the Larsmo/Öja archipelago to Jakobstad (in the south) and Karleby (in the north), we went to Karleby where a group of speakers where waiting for us at the city library. My observations in Karleby confirm many of the ones from Nedervetil, and luckily I remembered to test the form of the adjective after numerals: given that they have sg. indefinite after numerals from 2 and upwards, one might suspect that attributive adjectives are marked for singular (with the -an suffix). But that is not the case! The form of the adjective is the same as otherwise in the plural, i.e. the “bare” non-inflected form.
Kristine found quite a few verb movers in Karleby too, and the things that Christine tested (concerning negation) more or less conform to the general pattern that she has found for the other dialects in the area. The same holds for Henrik’s queries of case marking on pronouns (which in turn by and large conforms to the pattern he has studied in the dialects of Västra Nyland in the south of Finland).
In the evening yesterday we where interviewed by Jakobstads Tidning. The interview is available here (and is also linked up from the ScanDiaSyn front page). There was also a journalist from the newspaper “Österbottningen" at the library in Jakobstad when we were there.
Today we left Jugendsalen in Jakobstad where we have been staying during our days in Norra Österbotten. We headed for Esse where we again met with a group of informants like the other days, this time also at Hembygdsgården. The perhaps most interesting experience with the Esse session was to observe the difference between the older and young generation: in Esse there were two teenagers, both girls, and for my part it was quite striking to what little extent they use the “partitive” article.
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| Kristine Bentzen and a young Esse informant (Photo: Øystein A. Vangsnes) |
It in fact seems to be more or less “lost” from their language, although they did recognize it after ‘much’ but didn’t think they would use it themselves. On the other hand there seems to be new interesting morphosyntax emerging in what for structures...
The Esse session was the last one in our workshop. We headed for Nykarleby where we had lunch and then continued southwards to Solf for the ScanDiaSyn Grand Meeting that starts tonight. The conference site is very nice—it promises to be a very good setting for the meeting!
-Øystein
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