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NORMS Vestjylland
From 7-11 January 2008 NORMS organized a field trip to Western Jutland to investigate the syntactic properties of the variety of Danish spoken in that area. The trip was planned and organized by the Århus group in the NORMS network, and they set up a homepage for the event with various kinds of information for the participants. Below follow the blog entries that were written during and right after the fieldwork, extracted from the blog archive and ordered chronologically. The following news item appeared in connection with the fieldwork:
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| The NORMS field team in Western Jutland. Back row from left to right: Janne B. Johannessen, Ásgrímur Angantýsson, Magnus Brenner, Pål K. Eriksen, Tania Strahan, Sten Vikner, Henrik Jørgensen. Front row, left to right: Maia Andréasson, Karen T. Hagedorn, Eva Engels, Åshild Søfteland, Zakaris Hansen, Øystein A. Vangsnes. (Photo: S. Timer) |
Tysdag 8. januar
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| The view from Tambohus Kro (Photo: Øystein A. Vangsnes) |
The NORMS fieldwork on Western Jutlandic has started. 13 linguists from five of the partner groups have come together in Western Jutland with Tambohus Kro on Thyholm serving as the base camp and from where altogether four locations will be visited. Our first day began with an interesting presentation by Keld Kristensen of the Danish Language and Literature Society on various features of the traditional dialect in the area. In the afternoon we went to the school in Spjald where we had our first encounter with real dialect speakers. This was presumably our only opportunity during these days to interview children, and to our surprise, we found out that some of them actually do speak the dialect much like the older generations.
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| A school of informants in Spjald (Photo: Øystein A. Vangsnes) |
We were very pleased to see that no less than 25 adults from Spjald turned up to help us in our attempt to find out more about the syntax of Western Jutlandic. As during the previous NORMS fieldwork trips, the first day has been somewhat exploratory. We have nevertheless already learned a number of things. To mention a few: The preposed definite article – a well-known and unique syntactic trait from a Scandinavian point of view – is alive and kicking. One thing we still need to examine, however, is what form it takes in front of attributive adjectives: We have so far received reports suggesting that both æ gammel bil and den gammel bil (‘the old car’) are possible, the former homophonous with the obligatory form with unmodified nouns, the latter homophonous with the distal demonstrative. On the other hand we have established that den must be used in cases of noun ellipsis, hence den gammel vs. *æ gammel ‘the old one’. Tomorrow we'll give you more info on gender which works totally differently from other Scandinavian varieties.
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| Tania Strahan investigating proprial demonstratives and reflexives in Spjald (Photo: Øystein A. Vangsnes) |
Otherwise, it seems that subject extraction is preferably accompanied by insertion of dæ ‘there’ at the left edge of the embedded clause both with wh-movement (Hu manne trowwer du dæ snakke dialekt i Spjald ‘How many think you there speak dialect in Spjald’) and topicalization (Æll dem folk hæ trowwer a dæ snakke dialekt i Spjald ‘All these people here think I there speak dialect’): the existence of the latter there-insertion in particular is quite striking from a Standard Danish (and Scandinavian) point of view. At the same time, som-insertion of the dialectal Norwegian kind (with wh-extraction) is impossible.
We'll continue our investigations tomorrow at two locations, Sevel before lunch and Harboøre after lunch.
– Janne, Sten, and Øystein
Onsdag 9. januar
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| Paris, Jutland (Photo: Øystein A. Vangsnes) |
The second day of fieldwork in Western Jutland is over. We have visited two locations today. In the morning we travelled to Sevel where we met a group of local dialect speakers at Forsamlingsgården, the parallel of the Bystugur we visited in Älvdalen. In Sevel a journalist from Dagbladet showed up, and photographer too: We're not talking of media coverage at Norwegian national level, but we were happy for attention at this level too, and as always we look forward to reading about ourselves in the newspaper.
Lunch was had in Struer, the hub of the area, and on our way further west to Harboøre for the afternoon session we drove through Paris. In Harboøre they had opened the local hotel for us, otherwise closed for the season, and again we were met by a fair group of local dialect speakers. All in all we were very pleased with the informants: some of them have been very good at understanding the tasks and providing us with valuable information.
Below follow some findings and experiences made by participants in the workshop. The reader is welcome to ask questions in the comment fields which are unique to each item. First here's some cool linguistic trivia about the speech in the area. For starters take the consonantless sentence A æ u å æ ø i æ å, æ a ‘I'm out on the isle in the river, am I’. And here's one thing that I've heard several times during the day: Naj, så saj wi et! ‘No, that's not how we speak’. (Can you spot the negation?)
- Øystein
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| Struer harbour (Photo: Øystein A. Vangsnes) |
I have been looking at V2 and topicalization in embedded clauses in
Western Jutlandic, using questionnaires. So far, I have results from 21
informants and my data seem to support standard claims about these word
order phenomena in Danish: V2 and topicalization is allowed in (some types
of) that-clauses but disallowed in relative clauses, indirect questions
and (most types of) adverbial clauses. In general, non-subject-initial
embedded V2 has a higher acceptance rate than subject-initial embedded V2.
- Ásgrímur
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| Maia Andréasson and an informant in Sevel (Photo: Øystein A. Vangsnes) |
Not very surprisingly, the people of Western Jutland seems not to be very different from people speaking standard Danish when it comes to object shift. Pronouns, like ham (him) or hende (her) appear before negation in sentences where they are not clearly contrasted in the context: ham/hende ikke. If the pronouns appear in contexts where they get a contrastive interpretation, they appear after the sentence adverbial, ikke ham/hende, or in the first position of the clause.
The more interesting results I have got from these two days of field-work rather concern a subset of the object shift phenomenon. The pronoun det referring to a proposition (cf. Jeg sagde det 'I said it') may appear non-shifted (following a negation) in V1-questions, even when not contrasted. The informants all prefer the unshifted: Ole er jo syg, ved du ikke det? (Ole is [particle] ill, think you not that?) over the shifted variant: Ole er jo syg, ved du det ikke? The same kind of questions with ham or hende get the opposite result; they shift obligatory.
- Maia
I've been checking the distribution of it- and there-expletives across different sentence types (existential sentences, metereological
sentences, etc..), and I got quite good responses from the informants
today, although there was a slight difference in the data between the
two places we visited. Informants in Sevel seemed to allow a much
broader distribution of the there-expletive than in Standard Danish,
while the informants in Harboøre seemed to be more restrictive and
conforming to the standard norm.
– Pål
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| Karen Hagedorn and Henrik Jørgensen investigating the syntax of ‘sin’ in Western Jutlandic (Photo: Øystein A. Vangsnes) |
We are trying to establish the limitations concerning the pronoun 'sin' in Western Jutland. It is well-known that it is never used to refer to persons, neither as a reflexive nor as an anaphoric pronoun. Nevertheless it is possible to use it in certain contexts. We are especially interested in testing some marginal cases we have found, where 'sin' refers from a position in one finite sentence to an antecedent in another, unfortunately not always with full acceptance of the cases. Otherwise the 'sin' is frequently used when referring to animals - but some animals (pigs, horses and cows, but presumably not goats and sheep) have such a status than 'sin' is nevertheless inappropriate. On the other hand, examples with things or abstracts are normally not acceptable.
Karen and Henrik
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| Fieldworkers and informants at work in Harboøre (Photo: Øystein A. Vangsnes) |
I have looked at negative indefinites, which seem to be preferred to the "ikke
... nogen" variant and are able to move across various types of
intervening elements in Western Jutlandic.
– Eva
It appears that there is some kind of reflexivey-type pronoun in West
Jutlandic, and that it can have a local or a non-local antecedent, for
example 'Han barberer sig sjel', 'Han gav en gave til si bror' and....
'Trond ville have at vi skulle snakke om si bror'. I'm excited. Also
getting my heart pumping is that at least half of my informants have
said that 'Hun kendte ingen der var forelsket i sin søster' is
completely fine, and, oddly, considered more ambiguous than
the same (and other similar) sentences with 'hinnes søster'. In other
news, the pronoun determiner ('Ham Johannes han har ringet')
seems to be well accepted by the people I've spoken with, but it may
be used differently to in Norwegian. My informants have reported that
it matters whether or not the speaker or addressee knows the
referent, which is completely at odds with Janne's findings, where it
seems that knowing who the referent is is completely relevant (but
maybe not known personally?). The tension mounts...
- Tania
I have looked at the nominal paradigm, and can confirm the dialect
maps of Jysk Ordbog: There is no gender or number agreement on
adjectives, but the demonstratives and the pre-adjectival articles
agree: "den" with singular countable nouns, "de" with mass nouns. I've
also checked the plural forms of nouns, and it is clear informants do
find clear quantitative differences, which are impossible to hear for
the rest of us. Apparently short stød on the singular is common, as is
a lenghtening of final nasal consonants or stem vowels in the plural.
Furthermore, I have checked the reflexives, which display the known
difference between animates on the one hand and non-animates on the
other. Whether they obey any of the principle A binding conditions is
still under investigation, but they seem not to.
- Janne
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| Sten Vikner and an informant in Sevel (Photo: Øystein A. Vangsnes) |
I have examined the possessive construction: Where standard Danish has Det her er Annes bil "This is Anne's car", many people in West Jutland would say Det her er Anne hinne bil "This is Anne her car". In West Jutland, there is also a distinction between hinne and hinnes, very close to a similar difference in English which is NOT found in standard Danish: There is a final -s in Den her bil er Anne hinnes "This car is Anne hers", whereas there is no final -s in Det her er Anne hinne_ bil "This is Anne her car". This is thus parallel to the English difference between This is her_ car and This car is hers.
I have also looked at how to combine these expressions, and here I found examples of the following kind:
Det her er både Peter hans og Anne hinne gård "This is both Peter his and Anne her farm" and Det her er både Peter og Anne djer gård "This is both Peter and Anne their farm". Furthermore, if you want to say about a car that it belongs to Peter's father, you have large number of options, including Det er Peter hans fars bil, Det er Peters far si bil, and Det er Peter hans far si bil. Following research will have to show whether these can be used under exactly the same circumstances.
– Sten
Torsdag 10. januar
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| Rome, Jutland (Photo: Øystein A. Vangsnes) |
Yesterday we drove through Paris. Today we drove through Rome. Given that it took about 20 seconds in both cases it must be said that the size of these places is greatly exaggerated. Anyway, our destination today was Thorsminde, a small fishing hamlet right on the rough western coast of Jutland at the mouth (minde) of Nissum fjord. This turned out to give us an interesting experience. About eight local fishermen had been recruited and we met them at the village inn. When we arrived around 9.30 some of them had already had their first beer, and at this location the investigations would proceed with some of the informants smoking during the sessions (and the odd linguist too). Janne and Åshild got some really nice video recordings in the bar section of the inn: at the moment of writing we are all gathered in Stens hotel room looking at them and getting one great laugh after the other: these guys have a nice, subtle sense of humour.
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| Pål Eriksen and a fisherman from Thorsminde (Øystein A. Vangsnes) |
Setting the special setting aside, also these informants were of great help to us and some of them gave crystal clear judgments. One interesting result that Eva got was all of the ones she asked today could shift a negative DP across a verbal particle as in I daw snakke a ingn me "Today I talked noone with". This is quite surprising: although many Danes (and Icelanders) accept shifting a negative DP across a non-finite main verb (as in Jeg har ingen snakket med ‘I have noone talked to’) noone else accepts negative shift across just a particle. Pål discovered, through interim discussions with Sten and continued pondering, that the things he is investigating might not be peculiar to Western Jutlandic, but actually a trait of Danish in general: all the same highly interesting!
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Karen and Henrik overheard a spontaneously produced example of sin bound across a sentence boundary. I got an accidental observation from yesteday confirmed: the modal bo'er ‘should ("burde”) requires an infinitival marker before the infinitive main verb, i.e. for example Jens bo'er *(å) gå hjem ‘Jens ought to go home’. This is opposite of the situation in Standard Danish with respect to the cognate modal, and furthermore I found the same with the equivalent of ‘dare’: Han tør et *(å) gå hjem ‘He dares not to go home’ where Danish allows both options. On the other hand the modal ‘can’ behaves like in Danish and takes a bare infinitive. I'll pass the information on to Kristin Eide's new thematic group on Auxiliaries and modality.
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| Linguists and the North Sea at Thorsminde (Photo: Øystein A. Vangsnes) |
The schedule today left some time to experience the rough seaside and the Strandingsmuseum St. George in Thorsminde, commemorating the ship wreckage of two British naval vessels in 1811 and other mishaps since in the area. Unfortunately the weather did not invite us to enjoy the outdoors for very long, but we did have a look at the waves. After a stop in Lemvig we continued home for debriefing and our closing dinner. After dinner one of our informants from Sevel came to entertain us with story telling in the local dialect – quite amusing. Karen and Henrik then gave us a show of various interesting non-linguistic attractions in the area which we will have to return some other day to visit, and then we ended up in Sten's room for the video show. Now it's time to get some sleep – tomorrow is departure day, but further updates will appear here the coming days.
- Øystein
Måndag 14. januar
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| Reportage from the NORMS fieldwork in Sevel, Western Jutland, in Dagbladet Holstebro – Struer, Thursday 10 January |
The article by the journalist who showed up in Sevel on Wednesday, appeared in the newpaper already the next day. It was a very nice reportage spread over almost two full pages.
The NORMS fieldwork in Western Jutland is now over and the participants are back at their respective home institutions digesting the impressions from the week of encounters with this exotic variety of Danish. It has been a very interesting week for us who participated, and we learned a lot. The week also contributed to develop the "NORMS methodology" further, and one particularly fruitful refinement concerns the debriefing sessions that we had in the evenings where we went through what each one had been working on during the day. At the previous fieldwork trips we have not had organized collective debriefing of this sort, but rather had exchanges in more informal and relaxed settings for those who felt like it. Although stretching the working day considerably, the debriefings in Western Jutland were too useful not to be carried over to coming fieldtrips in some format or the other.
All in all the organization of this field trip has been impeccable, and we owe Karen, Henrik and Sten loads of mange tak. They chose a perfect location to serve as our base, they picked us up from various places at different times in their "dialekt-taxa" – mini-vans borrowed from the Faculty of Humanities in Århus for free! – and they dug up some very cooperative and friendly native speakers of Western Jutlandic for us. So thanks a bunch!
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| Zakaris Hansen interviewing a fisherman at the inn in Thorsminde (Photo: Øystein A. Vangsnes) |
Turning to some more linguistic results, one thing that I was pleased to discover in Western Jutland was evidence for the use of manner how as determiner. As I discuss in an upcoming paper of mine this is widespread in colloquial and dialectal Norwegian and Icelandic, and Swedish has its determiner hurdan, quite parallel in structure to the Dano-Norwegian hvordan (‘manner how’), but I had not so far run into any Danish linguist who could report of something of the kind for Danish. On the first night, after my first encounters with speakers from Spjald, Sten and I found mention of this use (called "adjectival") in Jysk Ordbok (the "Jutlandic Dictionary"). The entry contained about four examples, among which one of them was from the district that we visited ("Hardsyssel"). A very frequent response I got when I continued to ask "Can you say Hurn bil hå du? ‘How car do you have?’" at the various locations was that they spontaneously said Waffoen bil hå du? ‘What for a car have you?’. Still, when asked again and given some time to think it over, many of them would also accept the example with manner how used determinatively. And among those who accepted that, most of them could only use it to query for kinds, not for tokens (i.e. most of them did not like an example corresponding to "Which car is yours?", say in the context of the parking lot with five cars and the speaker wants to know which one of them belongs to the addressee). Waffoen, lit. ‘what for a’, (da. "hvad for en") may on the other hand be used for both kinds of queries, and that may be quite in line with both colloquial Danish and also German, but unlike what my impression is for Norwegian dialects where it yields token queries. By the way, most informants also accepted just wa as determiner, and let me add that the pronunciation in the westernmost places is /ha/, so you've got "ha" and "haffoen" (and "hem" instead of "wem" for ‘who’).
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| Tania Strahan and Magnus Brenner up against the waves at Thorsminde (Photo: Ásgrímur Angantýsson) |
We took some group pictures at the museum in Thorsminde with our amateur cameras. The quality of the pictures were not very good, but at least they document who participated in the field trip. Moreover, Tania put a selection of her photos on the web, including some cool shots of people and waves at Thorsminde, and they can be viewed here. And if you're curious to know more about the sites Paris, Rome, London, and Copenhagen in Western Jutland, you can do so here. On that note, let me end with some more linguistic trivia, linking Western Jutland to the Lyngdal area on the other side of Skagerak in Norway. First of all there is also Rom in Lyngdal, and Pål has even lived there for a while! Second, I was fascinated by the word nøjt (Da. "nødt”) which together with the copula and the P ‘to’ forms a predicate meaning ‘have to’: the pronunciation is identical to that of the Norwegian dialect, Han æ nøjt te..., and different from Standard Danish and most other Norwegian varieties. Third, the noun ‘(point in) time’ is also pronounced like in the Lyngdal dialect (and many others too), namely "gong" rather than the Standard Danish "gang". And this along with the non-broken form of the first person singular (nominative) pronoun, the uvular r etc. made things sometimes sound quite "sørlandsk", so I won't object if someone comes up to tell me about all the contact there has been up through history across the stretch of sea between the two lands.
- Øystein
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