Jeff Parrott in Gothenburg 14–15 March

Jeff Parrott works at LANCHART (Center for Language Change in Real Time) at Copenhagen University <http://lanchart.hum.ku.dk/>. On March 13 he took the direct (!) train to Gothenburg for two days of talks and discussions. Jeff is investigating current morphological and syntactic changes in Danish, in particular variations in the use of case marked pronouns. During his seminar, entitled On case allomorphy and variation in Danish and (North) Germanic, he presented data on the complementary distribution of subject and object forms of pronouns in Danish. According to Jeff, subject forms (jeg, du, vi  etc.) only occur as single (non-branching) daughters of [Spec, TP] and as rightmost conjuncts (hende og jeg), a distributional pattern also found in English and in many Norwegian dialects, but which is largely absent in Swedish dialects. Jeff's analysis combines ideas from phonology with Distributed Morphology. 

The data in Jeff's study comes from the large spoken corpus on Danish which is being collected and annotated at LANCHART, which so far is only available to researchers on site. In a talk for the local N'CLAV group the following day, Jeff presented the corpus and showed how different layers of annotation can be added in the PRAAT format. The discussion mainly turned around the intriguing question how come Swedish, which is also a 'vestigial case language' according to Jeff's definitions, behaves so differently from Danish and English. Notions such as markedness and prescriptivism were discussed as well as the need for more data on the historical development in Danish, Norwegian and Swedish.

/Elisabet Engdahl