UNIVERSITETET I OSLO
DET HUMANISTISKE FAKULTET
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Hjemmeeksamen/heimeeksamen i
NOR4170
Metode og prosjekt i nordisk språkvitenskap
Høst/haust 2011
Publisering: Mandag/måndag 5. desember kl. 13
Innlevering: Torsdag 8. desember på ekspedisjonen i 1. et. , Henrik
Wergelands hus i åpningstiden/opningstida (kl. 12.30-15)
Oppgavesettet er på 5 sider, forsiden medregnet.
Oppgåvesettet er på 5 sider medrekna framsida.
Sensur: Torsdag 5. januar 2012
Side 1 av 5
Bokmål:
Vedlagt følger fire korte beskrivelser av lingvistiske prosjekter. I noen av dem er mål og
problemstillinger helt eksplisitte, i andre er de mer skjult. Identifiser målene og
problemstillingene for hvert prosjekt, og diskuter (med referanse til pensumlitteraturen)
hvilke forhold som må bestemme valg av metoder for datainnsamling og analyser for å
kunne besvare forskningsspørsmålene.
Besvarelsen bør ikke overstige 2000 ord (utenom litteraturlisten).
Nynorsk:
Vedlagt følgjer fire korte skildringar av lingvistiske prosjekt. I somme av dei er mål og
problemstillingar heilt eksplisitte, i andre er dei meir skjulte. Identifiser måla og
problemstillingane for kvart prosjekt, og diskuter (med referanse til pensumlitteraturen)
kva forhold som må bestemme val av metodar for datainnsamling og analysar for å kunne
svare på forskningsspørsmåla.
Svaret bør ikkje overstige 2000 ord (utanom litteraturlista).
I.
On the relation between gender and declension
A diachronic perspective from Norwegian
This project examines the relation between gender and declension in Norwegian.
Traditionally, one has assumed that genders are the basis for predicting declensions in
that language. More recently, it has been suggested that declensions are the basis for
predicting genders—in all languages that have both.
In languages where nouns have both gender and declensional classes, there normally is a
relation between these two. In his masterful study Gender, Corbett (1991) argues that
gender should be predicted on the basis of declension. This claim is based on a discussion
of Russian, but Corbett (1991: 49) suggests that it can be generalised to other IndoEuropean languages: “Unfortunately, most investigators assume that the inflectional
morphology of German nouns should be derived from their gender, whereas the
alternative approach, as adopted for languages like Russian above, appears promising.”
This view has gained support, cf. Spencer (1999: 36): “As is apparent from the work of
Corbett […], in the cases which have been studied in proper detail, it is gender which is
dependent on inflectional class” (italics added here).
In Scandinavian grammar, the traditional procedure has at least implicitly been
the opposite; declension has been predicted on the basis of gender. In the fairly recent
Norwegian reference grammar, for example, it is said that most masculine nouns get -ar
in the plural (Faarlund et al. 1997: 182), and not that most nouns that get -ar in the plural,
will be masculine. To predict declension on the basis of gender is traditional in many
other languages, too (cf. Doleschal 2000: 125).
Thus, two opposite hypotheses have been suggested for Scandinavian:
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a. Gender is predicted on the basis of declension.We shall refer to this as the
‘DeclensionFirst’ hypothesis.
b. Declension is predicted on the basis of gender.We shall refer to this as the
‘GenderFirst’ hypothesis.
The main purpose of this study is to try to find out whether DeclensionFirst or
GenderFirst is better suited for Norwegian.
If there is a mismatch between a noun’s gender and its declension, the DeclensionFirst
hypothesis leads us to expect that, if anything changes, it is the gender that should be
most liable to change, whereas the declension should be more stable. Conversely, if
GenderFirst holds true, the noun’s gender should be diachronically more stable than its
declension, since, by this hypothesis, gender is somehow “more basic” than is declension.
An important proviso is that gender and declension can change for reasons that are
irrelevant to both hypotheses, e.g. phonological change; great care has been taken to
avoid such cases in this study.
II.
Meetings in Scandinavian organizations: an
interactional approach to leadership
The project will investigate practices of leadership and cooperation in Scandinavian
business meetings. The main aim will be to describe interactional practices related to
knowledge creation, communication climate and decision making. Furthermore, the
project will explore possible variations between the Nordic countries. By using an
interactional approach to the study of leadership, the project will explore how different
linguistic choices and conversational practices contribute to establishing different
management styles in meetings. The main research questions are:
a) What possibilities and what challenges do organizational meetings present for
managers and leaders, and how and with what conversational, interpersonal and
interactional resources are these managed?
b) Are there any differences in regard to doing leadership between the Scandinavian
countries, and if so, what are the consequences for communication in
interscandinavian meetings?
These similarities and differences will be explored in three areas that are especially
relevant to management style in the type of organizations investigated:
a) Knowledge: How do managers deal with differences in knowledge and
expertise in knowledge-intensive organizations?
b) Participation rights: How is the right to speak and participate in decisionSide 3 av 5
making negotiated in meetings?
c) Emotions and interpersonal relations: How are emotions and interpersonal
relations managed in order to create an open and constructive communication
climate?
III.
Språklig sosialisering blant flerspråklige barn
Prosjektets overordnede mål er å innhente kunnskap om og få bredere innsikt i og
forståelse av flerspråklige barns språklige sosialisering blant jevnaldrende, i familien og
på skolen med hovedvekt på hvordan de selv konstruerer og rekonstruerer sin
”multilinguality” eller ”flerspråklige identitet” (Aronin og Ó Laoire 2004). Det vil både
være et mål å studere de flerspråklige barnas konkret språklig praksis og deres og andres
holdninger til disse praksisene på ulike arenaer.
Studiens forskningsspørsmål kan sammenfattes i tre ulike typer spørsmål hva angår
barnas språklige sosialisering på skole- og familiearenaen: 1) ferdighetsspørsmål, 2)
bruksspørsmål og 3) holdningsspørsmål:
1. Ferdighetsspørsmål: Hvordan er barnas muntlige språkferdigheter i de språkene
de kan?
2. Bruksspørsmål: Hvilke(t) språk pleier barna å bruke i familien, blant venner og på
skolen og hvordan brukes de ulike språkene?
3. Holdningsspørsmål: Hvilke holdninger har barna, foreldrene og skolen til
flerspråklighet?
IV.
Investigation of syntactic variation of
phenomena across Scandinavian dialects
selected
With the broad generalisations being investigated by isogloss mapping, it is also
important to investigate some topics in further detail. We have chosen a topic where we
know there is variation, but where we lack answers to questions such as: How
widespread is this phenomenon geographically? How widespread is it among different
age groups? How does it correlate with other grammatical phenomena? How can this
phenomenon have developed? How can it be distinguished from or collapsed with similar
phenomena?
The project will be studied within a generative theoretical framework. This
framework is very well suited to study structural micro-variation, and is dominant in the
field of dialect syntax world-wide. But we would also like to point out that the goals of
our project are sufficiently descriptive (as is much dialectological research) to be
interesting long after the theoretical fashions of today have been replaced by those of
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tomorrow. Indeed, they will also be interesting for other contemporary scholars. We base
this belief on what we see in the research conducted by ourselves and others. The
reference lists are full of researchers belonging to a different time and to different
frameworks.
Main goal
•
to investigate, across Scandinavian, the syntax of questions
The research question for the dialect research
Topic: wh-questions
This topic is rooted in the expertise of Vangsnes and his colleagues (cf. Vangsnes 2004,
2005, 2007, Westergaard 2007, Westergaard and Vangsnes 2005). The research centers
around the fact that northern, central, and western Norwegian dialects allow lack of
subject/verb inversion in wh-questions: the word order Wh – Subject – Vfin (Ka du sa?
‘What you said?’) is grammatical alongside the standard Norwegian Wh – Vfin – Subject
(Kva sa du? ‘What said you?’). This is one of relatively few syntactic issues that have
been noticed and discussed in the traditional dialectological literature. Vangsnes (2004,
2005) has shown that the phenomenon is far from investigated: there is a range of dialectal variation related to (i) what types of wh-constituents allow lack of subject/verb
inversion, and (ii) subject/non-subject asymmetries. It has become increasingly relevant
to also study the internal structure of wh-elements dialect by dialect: the dialects differ
with respect to whether the complex wh-constituents have either (bare) what or where as
an integral part, and there are some pointers in the results so far suggesting that this
difference is important.
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