N'CLAV: N'CLAV Grand Meeting in Gottskär, Day 2

Therese Leinonen giving her talk Tuesday morning.
(Photo: Anders Eriksson)

Tuesday August 23rd, 2011

Day 2 of the N’CLAV Grand Meeting opened with a session of talks with a sociolinguistic perspective on Nordic dialects. First of these was invited speaker Sally Boyd’s talk on the language practices of young people in multilingual urban settings in Sweden, followed by Jenny Nilsson, talking about dialect contact in West Sweden (i.e. the regions Bohuslän and Västergötland), and Therese Leinonen on Finland-Swedish dialect leveling and regionalization in the Åboland area on the coast of Finland.

Before lunch Øystein Vangsnes delivered a memorial speech to long-time ScanDiaSyn participant Gunnar Hrafn Hrafnbjargarson, who passed away in a drowning accident earlier this summer.

Quiz master Pål K. Eriksen had no mercy.

After lunch the topic matter turned towards syntax, with Margrét Guðmundsdóttir giving a talk on the phonology and syntax of Icelandic, Jeffrey Parrot on case allomorphy in pronouns in Danish and Swedish, Kristin Eide on whether medieval Nordic immigration to England lead to a change in the tense and finiteness system of English, and finally Elisabeth Engdahl on methodological and theoretical issues connected to certain dependent constructions in the Nordic syntactic judgment database.

At the end of the day the group leaders met for discussion, while the other participants enjoyed their time off, e.g. going for walks in the beautiful Gottskär land – and townscape (see photos below), some even enjoying a bath in the sea. We had an excellent dinner at the conference site, and for entertainment after dinner we had a quiz on various trivia, a mix of popular culture, science and linguistics.

/Pål K. Eriksen