Chapter published in:
Syntactic Variation in Insular Scandinavian
Edited by Höskuldur Thráinsson, Caroline Heycock, Hjalmar P. Petersen and Zakaris Svabo Hansen
[Studies in Germanic Linguistics 1] 2017
► pp. 20–52

On quantity and quality in syntactic variation studies

| University of Iceland
This paper discusses some methodological issues in variation studies, drawing mainly on experience gathered in work on syntactic variation in Insular Scandinavian. First, it demonstrates the importance of having a large number of informants if you want to get a reliable picture of the distribution of certain variants or the ongoing development behind syntactic variation. Second, it is shown that different elicitation methods, e.g. absolute vs. relative judgments, can complement each other since they do not always yield the same kind of information. Third, the paper gives a partial answer to the question whether Faroese is moving towards Mainland Scandinavian.
Keywords: data elicitation methods, absolute vs. relative judgments, Faroese, Icelandic, parameters, acquisition of variation, case marking, embedded clause word order, transitive expletives, Stylistic Fronting
Published online: 18 July 2017
https://doi.org/10.1075/sigl.1.02thr
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