Janne Bondi Johannessen

Corpus-based vocabulary lists for language learners for nine languages

We present the KELLY project and its work on developing monolingual and bilingual word lists for language learning, using corpus methods, for nine languages and thirty-six language pairs. We describe the method and discuss the many challenges encountered. We have loaded the data into an online database to make it accessible for anyone to explore and we present our own first explorations of it. The focus of the paper is thus twofold, covering pedagogical and methodological aspects of the lists’ construction, and linguistic aspects of the by-product of the project, the KELLY database.

The pronominal psychological demonstrative in Scandinavian: Its syntax, semantics and pragmatics

The paper describes and discusses a demonstrative that has received little attention in the literature. The demonstrative can be found in many of the Scandinavian languages and dialects, and seems to be most frequent and widespread in the mainland Scandinavian languages. It has the same phonological form as third-person singular pronouns, and can be used only with nouns and have human (or human-like) specific reference. From a deictic perspective, the demonstrative is interesting because its conditions of use are linked to what I call psychological distance. Syntactically, it is also interesting because it has different characteristics in the different languages; in Norwegian and Icelandic it can be argued to be part of the DP, while the empirical facts of Swedish and Danish suggest that the psychologically distal demonstrative is DP-external in these languages.

Incomplete Acquisition and Verb Placement in Heritage Scandinavian

There is well known variation in the Scandinavian languages with respect to verb placement in embedded clauses (see e.g. Holmberg & Platzack 1995, Bobaljik 2002, Thrainsson 2010, Heycock et al. 2012 inter alia). In the modern Mainland Scandinavian languages, the finite verb follows negation in relative clauses and embedded questions (henceforth V-in-situ ). In Icelandic, on the other hand, the verb moves across negation to a position in the T-domain (henceforth V-to-T movement); see the simplified structure in (1). Older stages of Mainland Scandinavian pattern with Icelandic.

A corpus of spoken Faroese

The paper describes the new Corpus of Spoken Faroese. While the corpus is still under development with respect to content (number of informants, dialects and words), it is included in the larger Nordic Dialect Corpus, which means that all technical solutions are already in place. As a result, the Faroese corpus is fully operable, albeit with a rather limited number of words at present. The recordings have all been made, but transcription and tagging remain undone for most of them, however these are expected to be finished by the end of 2009. At the moment, there are nine conversations in the corpus. In the paper I describe some of the search and result-handling options the corpus offers, exemplifying with Faroese, and I also try to shed light on some linguistic questions using the corpus.

Complexity Matters: On Gender Agreement in Heritage Scandinavian

This paper investigates aspects of the noun phrase from a Scandinavian heritage language perspective, with an emphasis on noun phrase-internal gender agreement and noun declension. Our results are somewhat surprising compared with earlier research: We find that noun phrase-internal agreement for the most part is rather stable. To the extent that we find attrition, it affects agreement in the noun phrase, but not the declension of the noun. We discuss whether this means that gender is lost and has been reduced to a pure declension class, or whether gender is retained. We argue that gender is actually retained in these heritage speakers. One argument for this is that the speakers who lack agreement in complex noun phrases, have agreement intact in simpler phrases. We have thus found that the complexity of the noun phrase is crucial for some speakers. However, among the heritage speakers we also find considerable inter-individual variation, and different speakers can have partly different systems.

Retroflex variation and methodological issues: A reply to Simonsen, Moen, and Cowen (2008)

We argue that the differences in the articulation of Norwegian retroflex consonants described by Simonsen, Moen, and Cowen (2008) as individual variation may instead be due to factors such as individual and dialectal background, rather than variation across a single variety. Our main argument is based on existing dialect literature and speech corpus data, which show that the phonemes involved in the retroflexion process are not present in the same linguistic contexts in all dialects. SMC’s experimental stimuli and conditions include linguistic contexts which do not necessarily induce retroflexion naturally, and therefore cannot be relied upon to provide an accurate picture of retroflexion in natural speech contexts. The peculiar retroflex pronunciation that can be heard in some of SMC’s sound files may be due to the invasive intra-oral equipment or to the unnatural retroflexion contexts introduced by their stimuli. & 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Correlative Adverbs in Germanic Languages

Correlative words like either, both and neither have not been adequately discussed in the literature. Schwarz (1999) and Larson (1985) give an account of some of them (mainly either ) in terms of reduction and movement, respectively, but their theories, as they stand, cannot account for data from Germanic languages. Instead, there is evidence for Hendrikss (2002, 2001a, 2001b) idea that correlatives are focus particles. This paper presents a syntactic analysis which includes both overt movement and covert movement (akin to QR), inspired by Larson (1985) as well as Bayer (1996). It is central for the account that correlative particles are akin to adverbs, and can be analysed in terms of adverbial positions in a Cinquean way. Included in the paper will also be a presentation of differences between correlatives with respect to V2 in and across languages.

Tagging and the Case of Pronouns

Using a corpus to investigate empirically grammatical phenomena prior to writing grammatical rules or constraints for a disambiguating tagger is important. The paper shows how even case distinctions on pronouns are used more diversely than is usually assumed. Both in English and Norwegian nominative pronouns are used in more positions than the expected Subject one. Although the other uses are statistically less frequent, they may be important to the users of the resulting tagged corpus – who are often theoretical linguists. A tagger should therefore tag correctly also the more infrequent constructions. The paper shows how this can be done in a Constraint Grammar type tagger.

Factors of variation, maintenance and change in Scandinavian heritage languages

Aims and objectives/purpose/research questions: I investigate variation and change in heritage languages, focusing on descendants of 19th-/early 20th-century North Germanic immigrant languages in America. A battery of predictors (e.g. token frequency, language attitude) are compared against a baseline grammar, something often framed in terms of ‘transfer’, ‘incomplete acquisition’ and ‘attrition’. I examine which particular changes have been attributed to which factors. Design/methodology/approach, data and analysis: I synthesise and draw new conclusions from previous research on heritage Scandinavian. Findings/Conclusions: Relevant factors belong to two main categories: those favouring maintenance and those more likely to trigger change. Factors that support maintenance are structural ones (typically syntax, phonology and morphology), frequency of use and external factors. Factors that contribute to change are articulation, language attitudes and a series of cognitive aspects: incomplete acquisition and attrition, transfer and convergence, processing, memory, complexity and overgeneralisation. Originality: I undertake a comparative synthesis of patterns of change and non-change from baseline varieties. Significance and implications: This opens a door to investigating how factors correlate, what causal connections can be found and what levels of language are affected by what factors.

Annotations in the Nordic Dialect Corpus

In this chapter I focus on annotation in the Nordic Dialect Corpus, a dialect corpus that consists of dialectal speech from five closely related languages. There are two main types of annotation that are central: the annotation of speech itself, i.e. transcription, and the annotation of grammatical categories, i.e. tagging. Both are described and discussed, with a special focus on the success, or lack thereof, of some key choices.