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Grand Meeting 2008 at Sandbjerg

Paper abstracts

Maia Andréasson (University of Aarhus):
Not all pronominal objects are born alike:
The impact of accessibility and factivity on pronominal object shift in mainland Scandinavian

This talk aims to shed new light on the phenomenon of pronominal object shift in mainland Scandinavian, by presenting new data leading to the assumption that accessibility and not informative status is the key to much of the variation (cf. Gundel et al. 1993; 1999; 2003). Generally, analyses of pronominal object shift deal with data concerning objects referring to entities – introduced in the text by NPs. The point of departure of this talk is a corpus study of pronominal object shift that reveals an interesting pattern, namely that shifting or in situ placement of pronominal objects with antecedents introduced by clauses or VPs do not evoke the same interpretations as objects referring to entities. Pronominal objects with propositional antecedents hence appear in situ to a greater extent than those referring to entities, without any contrastive interpretation.

The analysis of Gundel et al (1999; 2003) will here be extended to account for the shifted or in situ placement of objects in mainland Scandinavian and it will be discussed if object shift is in fact not related to the informative status (ground/theme vs. focus/rheme) of the object referent. Cognitive status is – just as informative status – a major trigger of information packaging and it hence leads to the choice of lexical item for example in English (cf. "that" or "it") (Gundel et al. 1999; 2003) and the choice of prosodic features (cf. "activation stress" or de-stressing) and, as will be suggested in this talk, the choice of syntactic position (cf. shifted or non-shifted objects) in mainland Scandinavian.

(Click here for a longer abstract and references (pdf).)


Hans Bennis (Meertens Institute):
The Syntactic Atlas of the Dutch Dialects (SAND), Volume 2

In the fall the second and final volume of the Syntactic Atlas of the Dutch Dialects will appear. A detailed description of the following topics will be part of SAND-II:
- Clause final verb clusters
- Interruption of the verbal cluster with non-verbal material
- Morphosyntactic aspects of the verbal cluster
- Auxiliaries
- Negation
- Quantification
In this presentation I will show some of the most striking observations and discuss their relevance for microparametric syntax.


Eefje Boef (Meertens Institute/University of Utrecht):
Long-distance relativization in varieties of Dutch
The aim of this talk is to provide a description and a (unified) analysis of long-distance relativization structures in varieties of Dutch. Inspection of the SAND (Syntactic Atlas of the Dutch Dialects) data on relativization shows a considerable amount of variation regarding long-distance relativization structures in the Dutch speaking language area. More specifically, the Dutch dialects show variation along the following four parameters:

(i) the form of the element that introduces the relative clause (die/dat),
(ii) the form of the element that introduces the most deeply embedded clause (die/dat),
(iii) the presence/absence of a complementizer, and
(iv) the presence/absence of an overt subject/object (resumptive pronoun) at the extraction site.

I will assume that these differences are just surface effects, and hypothesize that all the variants of long-distance relativization have the same underlying structure. To be precise, I will assume a raising analysis of relative clauses according to which relative clauses are derived by successive cyclic wh-movement of the relativized constituent consisting of the head noun and the relative pronoun, and I will show that four micro-parameters can account for the attested differences.


Lars-Olof Delsing & Henrik Rosenkvist (Lund University):
Report on SweDiaSyn

The SweDiaSyn Project was founded by the Swedish Research Council (VR). The projectet started January 1st 2005, and is now in principle ended. The project has concentrated on transcripton and a number of case studies. The goal of the project was to create a corpus of transcribed dialectal speech and to investigate reigonal syntactic variation. The former project SweDia2000 collected modern spoken material from 97 different locations in Sweden. This has been the basis for our transcriptions. Our coupus now covers 49 of these locations, relatively evenly spread over the country. In our talk we will describe further the transcriptions and the case studies that we have carried out.


Elisabet Engdahl (University of Gothenburg):
Disappearing expletives

A common assumption is that modern Swedish has a strong subject requirement; an overt subject is required in tensed clauses. If there is no thematic subject in the clause, the expletive subject det is used, regardless of the surface position of the subject, as shown in (1)–(2).

(1)	a	*(Det)	regnade	i går.	b	Regnade	*(det)	i går?.
		it	rained	yesterday		rained	it	yesterday

(2)	a	*(Det)	har	kommit	många	lingvister	hit	i dag.
		it	has	come	many	linguists	here	today
	b	I dag	har	*(det)	kommit	många	lingvister	hit

In this respect Swedish and the other mainland Scandinavian languages differ from Icelandic, as discussed in Holmberg & Platzack (1995) from where (1)–(4) are taken. In Icelandic an expletive subject is only required in Spec CP.

(3)	a	*(Það)	rigndi	í gær.	b	Rigndi	(*það)	í gær?
		it	rained	yesterday		rained	it	yesterday

(4)	a	*(Það)	hafa	komið	margir	málvísindamenn	hingað.	(Ice.)
		it	have	come	many	linguists	here
	b	Í dag	hafa	(*það)	komið	margir	málvísindamenn	hingað.

However, the situation in Swedish is more complex than has hitherto been assumed. Parallel to (2b) , examples like (5), without an overt subject in TP, are attested throughout the development of Swedish, in particular in more formal written styles.

(5)	a	I	avtalet	har	funnits	en	övre	gräns
		in	the-agreement	has	found-PASS	an	upper	limit
		(There has been an upper limit in the agreement.)
	b	Har	*(det)	funnits	en	övre	gräns	i	avtalet?

The attested examples typically have a locative phrase in Spec CP. Note that if Spec CP is not filled, as in (5b), an expletive subject in Spec TP is obligatory.

In addition to examples like (5), new constructions are emerging in the language, as illustrated in (6)–(7).



In (6), the expletive det is optional in the presence of a topicalized referential det in Spec CP. In (7), Spec CP is filled with an accusative DP.

In this paper I will investigate the changing conditions on expletives in contemporary Swedish, looking in particular at the role of agreeing and non-agreeing predicates.

Holmberg, Anders & Christer Platzack (1995) The Role of Inflection in Scandinavian Syntax. Oxford: OUP


Eva Engels (University of Oslo):
Scandinavian negative indefinites: Microvariation in object positions

In the Scandinavian languages, sentential negation is expressed outside VP, forcing leftward movement of a negative indefinite object (henceforth Negative Shift). While string-vacuous Negative Shift is possible in all Scandinavian varieties, there is a considerable amount of cross-linguistic variation as to non-string-vacuous Negative Shift. In particular, the varieties contrast in which constituents can be crossed by Negative Shift and whether or not crossing of a certain constituent requires the presence of a main verb in situ.



The talk discusses which factors might be decisive for the availability of Negative Shift and which difficulties for syntactic analysis arise from the distributional patterns of negative indefinites.


Pål Kristian Eriksen (University of Helsinki):
How to talk about the weather and other worldly matters: Expletives as representations of the world.

Expletive subjects have traditionally been regarded as a purely formal phenomenon. They are considered to be non-referential items, which are licensed solely in order to satisfy a general subject requirement in the given language, whenever a sentence cannot provide a referential subject to do the job. In some generative analyses this view has been slightly challenged (e.g. Chomsky 1981 and Vikner 1995), but the general idea that expletives are non-referential, remains the same.

I argue that a formal analysis is not sufficient to account for the actual language data, since many North European language varieties show internal variation in the form and distribution of expletives. A simple example is the English distinction between a there-expletive in existential sentences and an it-expletive in other cases, but many other types of expletive systems are found in dialects and languages within the area. This variation is neither predicted nor explained by a formal analysis.

In my talk I will present a functional analysis, based on a view commonly found in functional typology, that subjects express the intersection of different functions, among them the pragmatic notion of topic. Building on a typological theory of topics developed by Maslova & Bernini (2006), I claim that North European languages can more properly be said to have a (special type of) topic requirement, rather than a subject requirement. I argue that expletives refer to the locative and/or temporal background of the event, i.e. to “the world” in a more or less narrow sense. This world, contextually presupposed as it were, functions as a default topic when the proposition does not provide any arguments with the necessary properties for being the required type of topic. Language internal variation in the form and distribution of expletives is then explained in terms of different semantic relations between the world and the event expressed by the proposition.

Chomsky, Noam. 1981. Lectures on Government and Binding: The Pisa Lectures. Mouton de Gruyter. Berlin.

Maslova, Elena & Giuliano Bernini. 2006. “Sentence Topics in the Languages of Europe and Beyond” in Bernini, Giuliano & Marcia L. Schwartz (eds.). Pragmatic Organization of Discourse in the Languages of Europe. Mouton de Gruyter. Berlin. 67-120. .

Vikner, Sten. 1995. Verb Movement and Expletive Subjects in the Germanic Languages. Oxford University Press. New York. .


Piotr Garbacz (Lund University):
Negative concord in Övdalian

As one of the very few Scandinavian varieties, Övdalian exhibits negative concord (NC), that is, two or more negative elements may yield one semantic negation in the language. This is illustrated by the examples below:

Övdalian: Ig ar it si’tt inggan (I haven’t seen anybody)
Swedish: *Jag har inte sett ingen (intended: I haven’t seen anybody)
Icelandic: *Ég hef ekki seð enginn(intended: I haven’t seen anybody)

In Garbacz (2006) I shortly mention the possibility of having negative concord in Övdalian as well as I briefly discuss the system of negation in Övdalian. I conclude that NC in Övdalian is optional and that it is articulated by the negative marker adverb and one (or more) n-word(s). Beside this, Oevdalian negation and negative concord hasn’t been subject of virtually any studies until now.

My talk is an attempt at presenting a deeper examination of the Övdalian negative concord, giving a preliminary description and analysis of the phenomenon. A comparison with other (Germanic, Romance and Slavic) negative concord languages/varieties is also done. Moreover, I discuss the structure of the Övdalian clause with respect to the position of negation. The talk is the result of my work on Övdalian syntax within an ongoing PhD-project.

Garbacz, P. 2006. Negation and verb movement in Övdalian. Working Papers in Scandinavian Syntax 78: 173-190.


Jacopo Garzonio (University of Padua):
Quantifiers and Negation in Italian Dialects

In this work I focus on the nature of two types of postverbal negative markers in Italian dialects: the first corresponds to English 'nothing' and, when it is used as a negative marker, it interacts with the argumental and aspectual structure of the predicate, as it is banned when the object is a definite one and, more generally, when the predicate is telic. I propose that this type of negative marker is located in a Quantifier position inside the Aspectual field in the IP layer, similar to the one postulated for 'all' by Cinque (1999). The second type of negative marker derives from minimizers and triggers partitive or genitive case on the direct object or the subject of unaccusative verbs, even if these elements are not used anymore as quantifiers. Both types of negative markers are sensitive to scalarity, which must be a core property of negation in natural language.


Frans Gregersen (University of Copenhagen):
On variation, its character and place in (socio)linguistic theory

Variation in Weinreich, Herzog and Labov's influential 1968 paper on the empirical foundations for a theory of language change became the primary weapon against the structuralist conception of change. It thus became inextricably bound to the concept of change. The focus of this paper is to untie this knot so that variation may be seen as a dimension of language in its own right. We do not necessarily have change whenever we have variation and conversely we do not necessarily have variation whenever we find change. The primary evidence for this claim will be an analysis of the a-variants of modern Danish viewed as more or less stable sociolinguistic variation.

In addition, I would like to diversify the notions needed to account for variation so that we agree on what we are talking about when we talk about variation. This makes a revisit to the famous dichotomies of competence and performance mandatory. Finally, I would like to raise the question of how to account for variation: rules? And if so: What kind of rules? How do we write grammars which incorporate variation?


Madeleine Halmøy (University of Tromsø):
General number in the Norwegian nominal system – with a focus on adjectives

This talk shows how the introduction of Corbetts (2000) notion of general number may facilitate a unified, compositional and economic account of the Norwegian nominal system with a special focus on the interaction between nouns and adjectives.


Gunnar Hrafn Hrafnbjargarson (University of Tromsø):
On verb movement, V2, and skulu

In my talk, I will summarize recent findings concerning verb movement and V2 in Scandinavian (part of my NORMS project and ongoing collaboration with Kristine Bentzen, Þorbjörg Hróarsdóttir, and Anna-Lena Wiklund) and recent findings concerning the modal skulu with respect to topicalization and extraction.

Handout


Janne Bondi Johannessen (University of Oslo):
The ScanDiaSyn database and dialect corpus

I will present a preliminary version of our common Scandinavian Corpus. The corpus is in the process of being developed with many search options and combinations, but is not yet in its final form. It includes the recordings with audio and video that we have so far and that have been transribed. The majority of the material is Swedish, Norwegian and Danish. More material will be added shortly as collection, transcription and proofreading is proceeding.

We would like feedback on the corpus itself, and not least on the contents. We want to add transcribed recordings from the field workshops. Material from Senja is included, while recordings from Alvdalen have been transcribed, but not quite completed yet. We hope to get the Western Jutland recordings transcribed this autumn. Both the latter have been / will be paid by NORMS. Likewise, the Faroese recordings will hopefully be transcribed and be possible to use in the corpus. For Icelandic, the situation is unresolved at this point.

The database with maps and isoglosses based on questionnaires will not primarily be discussed in the talk. Instead this will be the topic of the working group.


Randi Alice Nilsen (NTNU, Trondheim):
Intonational perspectives on dialect syntax

In this talk I will try to show that some Norwegian syntactic constructions can not be properly understood if the intonational component is overlooked. The constructions in question will be presented as examples of how intonation interacts with syntax so as to disambiguate between structures that may seem to be synonymous, and how intonation creates dialectical variation on the syntactic level. I will illustrate my point by using the following types of sentences.

(1) Sprang han langt?
(2) Hun kjørte mannen sin.
(3) Jon slo på radio’n.


Karen Margrethe Pedersen (University of Copenhagen):
Danish Dialect Syntax (presentation in Danish)

I det forløbne år har jeg skrevet et afsnit om dansk dialektsyntaks til en ny Dansk Sproghistorie, og jeg er i øjeblikket ved at skrive en artikel om bornholmsk dialektsyntaks til et festskrift.

På mit støtteark vil jeg give en oversigt over alle de emner, som jeg behandler i de to artikler, samt en oversigt over de emner, som jeg bevidst har udeladt. Man har hidtil sagt, at der ikke er meget dialektsyntaks i Danmark, men oversigten dementerer denne påstand. I foredraget vil jeg præsentere nogle udvalgte emner:

1. Ledstilling i ledsætninger (s v a, s a v, a s v) – med hovedvægt på den sidste.

2. Ledsætningers forfelt, med intern variation som følgende:
     det blev låst         for         ikke   at  de skulle løbe med det   
     vi kogte det         for   at    ikke        grynene skulle falde til bunds
     vi fik fæstepenge  for          ikke        vi skulle ryge af plads
     det var blødt       [-]   at    ikke         det skulle genere hesten   
     .. væk fra grisen  [-]   at    ikke    at  den skulle ligge på dem

3. Præposition med nul-infinitiv

4. Pseudo split-topicalization
      
Jeg vil strejfe spørgsmålet om syntaktisk variation, og jeg vil nævne to problemer for den komparative analyse i ScanDiaSyn: det strukturelle problem og det diakrone problem.


Hjalmar Petersen (University of Hamburg/University of the Faroe Islands):
Gender Assignment in Modern Faroese

The assumption is that gender assignment in Faroese is rule based and that gender is assigned according to the following assignment hierarchy: SAR >> MAR >> PAR. That is, semantic assignment rules do always precede morphological assignment rule, which in turn precede phonological assignment rules. There is also evidence in favor of neuter as being default, although there is need to work with three defaults: semantic default, syntactic default and word level default. In addition to this we will look briefly at gender in language contact.


Tania E. Strahan (University of Iceland):
Binding intrigue in Scandinavian

Icelandic famously allows long-distance reflexives, that is, reflexives which don't find their antecedent within the same clause as themselves, while Danish behaves more 'conservatively' and does not allow such binding. This is illustrated by the following examples, each with the intended reading of the English version.

Icelandic: Jón segir [að María elski sig].
Danish: *Jon siger [at Maria elsker sig].
English: *John says [that Mary loves himself].

Work by Strahan (2003) showed that there is dialectal variation in Norwegian with respect to the acceptability of sentences like these, and the recently conducted syntactic overview projects in Icelandic and Faroese have indicated that the grammaticality judgements reported in the literature do not match popular lay opinion. In addition, new data from Vestjysk Danish shows divergence from Standard Danish with respect to the acceptability of long-distance binding. The data behind these intriguing findings will be examined in this talk, with comments on some implications for syntactic theory and data collection methods.

This talk presents some highlights of my findings from 9 months as a NORMS postdoctoral researcher, investigating the topic of 'Long-distance binding in Scandinavian'. This talk will serve as the starting point for the workshop discussion of 'Where to from here?', led by Tania Strahan and Hans Bennis later in the week.

Strahan, Tania E. 2003. Long-distance reflexives: a quantitative study. München: Lincom-Europa.


Höskuldur Thráinsson (University of Iceland):
Some things we learned from IceDiaSyn

In this paper I will first give a brief overview of the material collected in the IceDiaSyn project and then discuss some issues that have to do with the collection of grammaticality jugdment data. I will do this by reviewing some methodological suggestions that have appeared in the literature, mainly in Carson Schütze's book "The Empirical Base of Linguistics" (U. of Chicago Press 1996) and the article by Cornips and Poletto "On standardising syntactic elicitation techniques" (Lingua 115, 2005), and say which of these suggestions we followed and which ones we did not follow and why. I will then offer some (preliminary) evaluation of the methods employed in our study.


Øystein A. Vangsnes (University of Tromsø):
What kind of Scandinavian? On interrogative noun phrases across North Germanic

The main objective of this paper is to show how much variation there is across Scandinavian with respect to the morphosyntactic form of interrogative noun phrases. The presentation focuses on three different main types of such DPs: (i) phrases involving a cognate of English which, (ii) phrases involving the same element as manner how (which is morphologically complex and distinct from degree how), and (iii) phrases involving what with or without an overt kind noun. With respect to all of these different types of noun phrase internal wh-expressions an interesting pattern seems to emerge: there are reasons to hold that adnominal wh-expressions start out as modifiers, yielding kind-querying noun phrases, and then develop into determiners which yield token-querying noun phrases. Although further investigations will have to determine whether such a developmental path (or cycle) is quite general in nature, it can be made perfect sense of with reference to grammaticalization induced by wh-movement: given a DP-structure that distinguishes modification from determination in such a way that the locus of determination is higher than modification, wh-modifiers will wh-move to the left edge of the noun phrase, passing over the position for determiners. Over time the expression may thus be associated with the determiner position as such, either in addition to or instead of the lower modifier position.

Viðarsson abstract – jpg-version

Heimir Freyr Viðarsson (University of Iceland):
Do-support in Old Norse

In Old Norse (ON) poetry, it is not uncommon to see examples in which the lexical verb is accompanied by a support verb, e.g. gera and tjá (both meaning ‘do’), denoting the same meaning, it appears, as in cases where the lexical verb occurs without a support verb. An example of this would be the first long-line of the 57th stanza of Völuspá: (Click here for the rest of the abstract in pdf! Click the picture for a jpg-version!)





Group work abstracts

The group work will take place Wednesday afternoon the 27th, and the main purpose with it is to (i) discuss the topic addressed in the relevant talk(s) and (ii) to identify possible collaboration on issues in that particular domain of grammar.

Binding
led by Tania Strahan and Hans Bennis

Over the past 25 years, much headway has been made into Scandinavian anaphora, but still we are finding out new facts, and there is yet more we can do in this area. Two directions in which such research might be productively continued, are in the collection of parallel data from the different languages and varieties (which has been planned before, but is nowhere near complete), and in the use of data collection techniques other than introspection and simple grammaticality judgements. Elicitation tasks, evidence from conversational data using the spoken language corpora being developed and psycholinguistic tasks are all time-consuming but important tools we should be using. In addition, our hypotheses about binding and coreference can be checked by building and testing automatic parsers, and the internet (especially the new Google forms) can be used to obtain grammaticality judgements as well as simply providing examples.

The different binding domains which appear to be relevant include the coargument domain, the finite tense domain, complement domains, adverbial domains, relative clause domains and possibly a mood domain. These can sometimes be modified by animacy and/or person of an intervening NP, or by the upstairs or downstairs predicate or combination of predicates. Some relevant examples will be presented in Tania's talk on the Monday, including the famous Jón segir að Maria elski sig 'John says that Mary loves himself' from Icelandic.

In this discussion, we would like to hear people's thoughts on the topics raised in or by the talks, with respect to how further studies might be conducted in order to continue advancing our practical/empirical and theoretical understanding of anaphora and binding. A workshop/conference on anaphora and binding in Reykjavik in spring 2009 is in the early planning stages, and ideas for a united approach at this workshop (and ensuing publication!) will be discussed.


Database development
led by Janne Bondi Johannessen

The database with maps and isoglosses based on questionnaires will be discussed . We are very interested in input, ideas and feedback to any aspect of the database and also the corpus. Both technical solutions and linguistic contents are areas where many decisions will be have to be made. Here, too, we are of course very interested in feedback and ideas.

How do we draw isoglosses across all of Scandinavia if we don't have the same input data?
How do we present conflicting inoput from questionnaires?
Which informants can be ditched, if any?
How many dialect features can we mention?
What do we call the various syntactic dialect features?
How can we get questionnaire data for languages that haven't started yet (Swedish, Faroese)?
How can we get questionnaire data for languages where investigations have been made (Icelandic)?
How can we use data from the fieldwork trips (all data must be put into the Document Chest)?