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

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

Grammatical Gender in American Norwegian Heritage Language: Stability or Attrition?

This Document is Protected by copyright and was first published by Frontiers. All rights reserved. it is reproduced with permissionThis paper investigates possible attrition/change in the gender system of Norwegian heritage language spoken in America. Based on data from 50 speakers in the Corpus of American Norwegian Speech (CANS), we show that the three-gender system is to some extent retained, although considerable overgeneralization of the masculine (the most frequent gender) is attested. This affects both feminine and neuter gender forms, while declension class markers such as the definite suffix remain unaffected. We argue that the gender category is vulnerable due to the lack of transparency of gender assignment in Norwegian. Furthermore, unlike incomplete acquisition, which may result in a somewhat different or reduced gender system, attrition is more likely to lead to general erosion, eventually leading to complete loss of gender

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