The Nordic Dialect Corpus — an advanced research tool

Proceedings of the 17th Nordic Conference of Computational Linguistics NODALIDA 2009. Editors: Kristiina Jokinen and Eckhard Bick. NEALT Proceedings Series, Vol. 4 (2009), 73-80. © 2009 The editors and contributors. Published by Northern European Association for Language Technology (NEALT) http://omilia.uio.no/nealt . Electronically published at Tartu University Library (Estonia) http://hdl.handle.net/10062/9206

Contents

Proceedings of the 17th Nordic Conference of Computational Linguistics NODALIDA 2009. Editors: Kristiina Jokinen and Eckhard Bick. NEALT Proceedings Series, Vol. 4 (2009), iii-vi. © 2009 The editors and contributors. Published by Northern European Association for Language Technology (NEALT) http://omilia.uio.no/nealt . Electronically published at Tartu University Library (Estonia) http://hdl.handle.net/10062/9206

Conference Program

Proceedings of the 17th Nordic Conference of Computational Linguistics NODALIDA 2009. Editors: Kristiina Jokinen and Eckhard Bick. NEALT Proceedings Series, Vol. 4 (2009), xi-xiv. © 2009 The editors and contributors. Published by Northern European Association for Language Technology (NEALT) http://omilia.uio.no/nealt . Electronically published at Tartu University Library (Estonia) http://hdl.handle.net/10062/9206

Spontal-N: A Corpus of Interactional Spoken Norwegian

Spontal-N is a corpus of spontaneous, interactional Norwegian. To our knowledge, it is the first corpus of Norwegian in which the majority of speakers have spent significant parts of their lives in Sweden, and in which the recorded speech displays varying degrees of interference from Swedish. The corpus consists of studio quality audio- and video-recordings of four 30-minute free conversations between acquaintances, and a manual orthographic transcription of the entire material. On basis of the orthographic transcriptions, we automatically annotated approximately 50 percent of the material on the phoneme level, by means of a forced alignment between the acoustic signal and pronunciations listed in a dictionary. Approximately seven percent of the automatic transcription was manually corrected. Taking the manual correction as a gold standard, we evaluated several sources of pronunciation variants for the automatic transcription. Spontal-N is intended as a general purpose speech resource that is also suitable for investigating phonetic detail

What kind of corpus is a web corpus?

Proceedings of the 18th Nordic Conference of Computational Linguistics NODALIDA 2011. Editors: Bolette Sandford Pedersen, Gunta Nešpore and Inguna Skadiņa. NEALT Proceedings Series, Vol. 11 (2011), 122-129. © 2011 The editors and contributors. Published by Northern European Association for Language Technology (NEALT) http://omilia.uio.no/nealt . Electronically published at Tartu University Library (Estonia) http://hdl.handle.net/10062/16955

Verb Second Word Order in Norwegian Heritage Language: Syntax and Pragmatics

Posted with permission of Georgetown University Press.In this paper, we investigate verb second (V2) word order in Norwegian heritage language spoken in the United States, i.e., in a situation where the heritage speakers have English as their dominant language. We show that not only the syntax of V2 may be affected in a heritage language situation, but that the number of contexts for this word order may also be severely reduced (i.e., non-subject-initial declaratives). V2 languages typically have a high proportion of non-subject-initial declaratives in spontaneous speech, while English declaratives are mainly subject-initial. The reduction of non-subject-initial declaratives (the context for V2) is thus argued to be the result of cross-linguistic influence from English. We also show that this correlates with non-target-consistent word order, in that the fewer contexts for V2 that speakers produce, the more non-target-consistent non-V2 word order appear in their data. We also discuss to what extent there is a causal relationship between the two phenomena

Demonstrative reinforcement cycles and grammaticalization

Demonstratives, broadly defined as deictic expressions, do not develop through grammaticalization (Diessel 1999: 150). The renewal of demonstratives, and the mechanisms and motivations underlying such processes, have not been studied in great detail. Greenberg’s (1978) observation that demonstratives are often replaced by reinforced forms might shed light on this diachronic process, and this study aims to explore this phenomenon further, as well as its connection with grammaticalization. I hypothesize that the frequent reinforcement of demonstratives can lead to the development of new demonstratives, which may catalyze the grammaticalization of old ones. The hypothesis presented here differs from many other accounts of renewal in that it sees reinforcement as a possible driving force behind grammaticalization, and not vice versa, as suggested in Diessel (2006: 474) and van Gelderen (2011: 210), among others.