Workshop on Finnish dialect syntax
The
workshop brings together researchers working with questions relating to
syntactic phenomena in Finnish dialects and presents new empirical results from FinDiaSyn, a four-year
project on Finnish dialect syntax started in 2008. The Fennistic research
tradition is like that of a number of other languages in that while much weight
has been given to dialectology, the work has concentrated on data collection
and phonological, morphological, and lexicological questions. As a result, a
respectable amount of corpus material of Finnish dialects has been collected,
and the morphophonological history behind Finnish
dialects has been widely discussed. There is also a rich body of results on
present-day sociolinguistic variation in morphophonological features. Much less
has been said and done with regard to syntactic phenomena in Finnish dialects.
Accordingly,
the prevailing view of Finnish is largely based on historical morphology, on
the one hand, and standard language syntax, on the other. While this view is
certainly correct with regard to standard written Finnish, much existing
variation is lost by overlooking the variation underlying the standard variety.
This is especially regrettable given that standard varieties of different
languages tend to show similarities which may not have a basis in the
vernacular varieties but, rather, in the European literary tradition and a
common tradition of standardization.
The
papers presented in the workshop aim at questioning the existing standard view
of the Finnish language: To what extent can we accept the received typological
picture of Finnish at face value? And to what extent should we alter the
standard view?
Dialect
syntactic research has been very lively throughout Europe in recent years (see
e.g., http://www.dialectsyntax.org/, http://uit.no/scandiasyn/). The research objectives have
largely arisen out of the Generative/Minimalist paradigm, and much useful
experience has been gathered of careful questionnaire-based methods. While
dealing with similar questions, the papers in the present workshop are more
usage-based in orientation, operating in a constructionist-functional-cognitive
framework and drawing from existing
databases of natural discourse. These databases are rich as such but
fairly narrow in terms of genre or situational variables, which has necessitated
considering new data gathering methods. Questions of data and methodology have
therefore a prominent place in the workshop.
| Last modified: Friday, 24-Jun-2011 23:17:43 EEST |