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NORMS fieldwork in Senja 2006
Sundag 29. oktober
I'll switch to English soon: tomorrow we'll be fifteen people off to Senja for the second NORMS dialect workshop/fieldwork, see this page. I hope to be blogging from this one like I did from the one in Northern Ostrobothnia in June – this time there's even a chance that I can have of the other guys write some words as well...
Imens kan eg fortelja at eg fekk god omsetnad på pressemeldinga mi her om dagen. To siders oppslag i Nordlys på fredagen, ei side i Troms Folkeblad, samt sjølve pressemeldinga på nettversjonen, intervju på NRK Troms og Finnmark si ettermiddagssending og så var det ein videojournalist som ringte og varskudde at han ville komma og laga eit innslag med oss når me er i Botnhamn på tysdag. Ikkje nok med det: Nordlys-oppslaget vart utnemnt til vekas tips (!) i går i laurdagsnummeret, og no i kveld er eg blitt intervjua for "dagens tromsøværing"-spalta i avisa i morgon. Så det eine fører til det andre! He-he! All PR er god PR...
Vel, enno er det nokre småting som skal på plass før morgondagen. Det kjem til å gå slag i slag frå morgonen med det innleiande seminaret før avreise med hurtigbåten til Senja.
- Øystein
Måndag 30. oktober
The first day of the NORMS fieldwork on North Norwegian is over – in fact we're well into the 31st by now... We had an intense open seminar at the university earlier today between 09.00 and 15.15 before catching a taxi to the boat that were to carry us to Senja. Now all fifteen of us are accomodated at Mefjord Brygge in Mefjordvær. We continued our intense work after dinner and discussed the upcoming fieldwork by identifying the areas of interests of the individuals and by grouping the ones that have overlapping research questions. (I bet that never have so many Macintosh laptops been observed at the same time in the bar at Mefjord Brygge!)
Here are a few of the topics that will be investigated the coming days in Senja:
– wh-questions and ±V2
- wh-determiners
- pronominal demonstratives
- negation
- "OV"-structures
- resumptive pronouns
- prepositions and verb particles
- recursive indefinite articles
- verb placement (in embedded clauses)
- clefts
- comparative constructions
- expletive subjects
Tomorrow we'll go to Botnhamn where we'll have our first fieldwork session at the local school between 09.30 and 14.30. Some twenty informants have been recruited. Then back in Mefjordvær in the afternoon we'll interview some persons from this community. And then we'll finish off the day with some lutefisk!
- Øystein
þriðjudagur 31. oktober
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| Overlooking the inner part of Øyfjorden: Janne, Peter, Christine, Mari, Piotr (Photo: Øystein A. Vangsnes) |
This morning a flock of 15 linguists woke up way too early to take the bus to Botnhamn. The roads of Senja are steep and the tunnels narrow but this didn't prevent the bus driver from driving like a maniac.
The scenery was absolutely magnificent.
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| Merete and Tarald interviewing a Botnhamn informant, Helge observing (Photo: Øystein A. Vangsnes) |
In Botnhamn (where we drank a lot of coffee), we met 16 enthusiastic informants. The elicitation went well although the poor informants had to wait a lot since there are so many of us linguists.
We departed Botnhamn at 15 and drove back to Mefjordvær, with a detour to Husøya. Husøya is a small island, where practically every square meter is covered with buildings.
The landscape was even more dramatic on the way back.
In Mefjordvær, a flock of friendly ladies (and some more coffee) awaited us. Male informants don't seem to grow on each straw here.
Now it's almost time for lutefisk.
The phrase of the day: Ja, sånn b(l)i æ å sei. (‘Yes, so become I to say.’)
- Gunnar Hrafn
I'd like to point out that it wasn't just a lot of coffee that was consumed in Botnhamn. Upon arrival we were offered amounts of cakes and cookies, and after a while there was also a pretty decent lunch buffet. The informants in Botnhamn were some of the most positive and patient I've come across ever. Tarald and Merete had great difficulties finding anyone who would accept postadjectival indefinite articles when asked, but Janne claims they occur in the spontaneous data that she and Mari recorded. It's too early to give a detailed report from the wh-elicitation experiment that Marit and I had set up, but I'm quite confident that some juicy details are emerging.
Some other phrases of the day:
"Æ fikk endeli skorre skolten a han" (‘I finally managed to cut the head off of him’)
"Ka slags elskar e han?" (‘What kind of lover is he?’)
"Kor mange ha du hatt på si?" (‘How many have you had on the side?’)
There has furthermore been continued media coverage. A reporter from NRK visited us while we were in Botnhamn, a call which resulted in both radio and television reports this afternoon.
And the lutefisk was not only a well-deserved closure of a hard day of work – it was excellent!
- Øystein
Where is the pattern?
There is NO pattern! Only chaos!!!
- Gunnar Hrafn
One clear pattern that has emerged in my data is the following: many speakers have a (non-agreeing) perfect participle which is distinct from a (non-agreeing) passive participle. For example, E har skotte en bjørn "I have shot a bear" vs. Bjørnen bei skotten "The bear was shot" but also Dyre/Dyran bei skotten "The.animal/The.animals was shot"; this is different from the E. Norwegian/Danish/English pattern which does not distinguish the two, and from the Icelandic pattern in which the perfect is identical to the neuter singular form of the passive, and from the Swedish in which the perfect is distinct from the passive, but the passive shows agreeing forms.
- Peter Svenonius
miðvikudagur 1. nóvember
Husøya in Øyfjorden (Senja) (Photo: Gunnar Hrafn Hrafnbjargarson)
- Gunnar Hrafn
Fredag 3. november
The NORMS expedition to Senja is coming to an end. We'll be returning to Tromsø this afternoon by boat from Finnsnes. We had arrived in Medby Wednesday afternoon and met with some informants that evening, and today we have continued the investigations in Medby. Yesteday we travelled from Medby through a blizzard and spent the day in Stonglandseidet on the southernmost part of the island. Merete and Hilde had left earlier to Svanelvmoen to meet a couple of older persons from the Saami area of inner Senja. There are no Saami speaking persons left anymore, but one of them had grown up with Saami speaking parents and claimed to have passive knowledge of the language. As far as Merete and Hilde could tell there were no obvious substrate features in the speech of the persons they met, but it would be interesting to come back and study this group in more detail some day.
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| Quiet fjord, Medby; distant dark clouds on the horizon (Photo: Øystein A. Vangsnes) |
Througout these days we must have talked with something like 80 different people and we have gathered a lot of data. Every informant has obviously not been tested for all topics, but I reckon that on average there have been around 20 informants for every topic. So we are quite satisfied.
Merete and Tarald have now encountered more people that allow doubling of the indefinite article. Peter has been working hard with his past participles, not only with the informants but also with the rest of us. For my own part I think I have disconfirmed that the wh-determiner kas is specialized with respect to kind/token readings – people claim not to use it much, but the questionnaire results quite clearly suggest that it can be used to query for both types and tokens. (In fact I think that it's true that kas can be viewed as a contraction of ka slags ‘what kind of’ and that even this determiner is compatible with token readings, not just kind readings.) We have also substantial evidence for som-insertion with -extraction from embedded clauses, and I'm really looking forward to finding out if there is any correlation with ±V2 (in the matrix clause) and insertion of som in left periphery of the embedded clause.
- Øystein
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| Eagle watching in Senjahopen: Sigla in the background, rowan berries in the foreground (Photo: Øystein A. Vangsnes |
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