Difference between revisions of "Classroom:LING2208 - Annotating Norwegian Bokmål"

Latest revision as of 22:16, 9 May 2014

Agreement

The following phrase contains agreement between the noun kjøttbein and the adjectives fint and saftig:

[[1]]

Both adjectives are tagged as being singular and indefinite, which corresponds to the head of the NP in which they are embedded; et fint, saftig kjøttbein. Although kjøttbein is only tagged as neuter, its indefiniteness is given by the determiner et, which also agrees with the noun. Fint is also tagged as being neuter, which agrees with the noun. Saftig does not have gender indicated, and would agree with a noun of any gender, as long as it is indefinite and singular. Whether there is gender agreement between noun and adjective therefore depends on the adjective.

The corpus for Norwegian Bokmål available on TypeCraft contains 182 sentences featuring words tagged as adjectives, with 60 of them tagged with gender markings, such as in the adjectives discussed. This may be an indication of the ratio of adjectives with gender agreement (such as fint) to those without (saftig).

Clause Linkage

The phrase mentioned above is also a complex clause, consisting of the simple clauses Han så en slakterbutikk and [og gikk raskt inn [og stjal et fint, saftig kjøttbein fra hyllen]].

Below needs to be reformulated

The complex clause is an adjoined clause, in which the second simple clause contains a conjunction (og), and is coordinated with the first clause. The syntagms are not in a relation of dependency, as no grammatical slot is occupied by one. Therefore, the second syntagm is not embedded, in which case it would fill a grammatical slot.

The second syntagm may itself be divided into two coordinate clauses, which in turm form a coordinate clause itself. All of thee clauses in the sentece constitute syndetic parataxis.

If Lehmann's terminology is used it should be done properly. Alternatively Government can be used for selected clauses while other forms of embedding should simply be described.

Spelling mistakes could be corrected on the way!

The syntagms describe a series of events in temporal order. The first clause contains the head of the sentence (så), and would be grammatical without the rest of the coordinated clauses. Gramatically, the clauses are all linked by tense (past), and the grammaticality would be questionable if they were in different tense. This may be because all of the clauses share the same subject.

--Are Ormberg 13:31, 17 February 2014 (UTC)

Common gender

While Norwegian technically features three genders; common masculine and feminine, feminine nouns (such as elv (river)) often appear in Norwegian Bokmål dialects as masculine (elv-en rather than elv-a). This presents an issue regarding annotation practice: If a noun is realized as masculine, it should not be tagged as feminine, but sice it is not techincally masculine, it can not be tagged as such either. There are POS and gloss tags that indicate common gender (NCOMM and COMM), which are fitted for these cases. In all cases of common gender, it is optional whether the masculine or feminine form is used; it would not be considered ungrammatical in Norwegian Bokmål to use the feminine gender in place of common gender. Place names reflect this too; Lysakerelv-en and Akerselv-a are two rivers in the Oslo region that feature different gender markings for the noun elv (river), as is the case with the places Majorstu-en and Bekkestu-a

In the following transcription, katt (cat) appears as masculine, while actually being a feminine noun. It is therefore tagged as neuter, along with determiners and pronouns:

Throughout this text, the cat is referred to by pronouns (den). The pronoun that refers to a masculine or common nouns has the same form as that of feminine nouns, so no indication is here made of whether it is possible to alternate between feminine and common gender.

--Are Ormberg 10:20, 7 March 2014 (UTC)

AGREEMENT

"Den innså sin egen dårskap for sent og gikk avsted sulten og trist men kanskje litt klokere" [[2]]

The pronoun "den" is a deictic element that picks up its content in "hund" (eng: dog), along with its specifications COMMON GENDER for the feature GENDER, as well as its definite marker suffix "-en", specified for the value SINGULAR for the feature NUMBER. These values spread from "den" to the adjectives "sulten" and "trist".

Both the reflexive pronoun "sin" and the possessive article "egen" (eng: own) are targets of one controller, the noun "dårskap", and so "sin" and "egen" need to agree with the succeeding noun on the values SINGULAR and COMMON GENDER for the features NUMBER and GENDER.

The reflexive pronoun "sin" also needs to agree referentially with its the values of its antecedent, "den". It is important here to bear in mind that agreement is not the same as reference. The two phenomenon may seem deceptively similar, as they both involve a kind of matching of features. One way of differentiating agreement from reference is to see if there any degree of choice involved: if there is, chances are there is reference, and not agreement. To illustrate what I mean by choice see examples below:

- "JEG spiste MIN mat". (I ate MY food)

- "JEG spiste DIN mat". (I ate YOUR food)

As seen above I may freely choose to refer to anyone's food. With agreement there is no choice:

- (1) "Jeg spiste MITT EPLE" ("I ate MY APPLE")

- (2) # "Jeg spiste MINE EPLE" ("I ate MY APPLE")

Here the result is an ungrammatical sentence when the values of the controller (the noun "eple") and the target (the possessive articles "mitt/mine") do not agree; in (1) both are SINGULAR and NEUTER, whereas in (2) the possessive article has switched to PLURAL and COMMON GENDER.

--Eirik Zahl--Eirik Zahl 22:16, 9 May 2014 (UTC) (UTC)

CLAUSE LINKAGE

"Den innså sin egen dårskap for sent og gikk avsted sulten og trist men kanskje litt klokere" [[3]]

The complex clause above consists of two simple clauses;

1: "Den innså sin egen dårskap for sent" 
2: "Den gikk avsted sulten og trist men kanskje litt klokere"

These two simple clauses are connected with the conjunction "and", which often is used to coordinate two or more clauses. In other words we are here dealing with an example of parataxis, in which the clauses are independent of each other (even though they share the same subject). A sign of this is the inflection of the verb contained in these clauses, and that the clauses are quite autonomous, as shown in the breakdown into separate clauses 1 and 2 above. However, they agree in tense (both are in the preterite) which suggests that they are linked temporally. From the semantic content it may seem that the clauses are linked causally, which would imply subordination, or hypotaxis: "Because <Den innså sin egen dårskap for sent>, <gikk den avsted sulten og trist men kanskje litt klokere>", but in my view this complex clause seems to be an example of coordination rather than subordination.

--Eirik Zahl 19:16, 16 February 2014 (UTC)

Expletive pronouns

Expletive pronouns are also called pleonastic or "dummy" pronouns, and are quite commonly used in Norwegian and English. In fact, these languages require an expletive pronoun to appear as a replacement for subjects in clauses where the latter should be missing. The classic example is:

- "It is raining."

One may ask, exactly what is "it" that is raining; does "it" refer to the falling raindrops? No, because a characteristic feature of expletive pronouns is their lack of a referent. Yet if we leave "it" out we are stuck with an incomplete and ungrammatical sentence:

- # "Is raining."

The same goes for the Norwegian equivalents:

- "Det regner" ("it rains")

- # "Regner" ("rains")

Whereas in a language like Spanish one has no choice but to leave out the expletive pronoun, and simply say:

- "Está lloviendo" ("is raining")

In fact, the inclusion a pronoun would result in a truly unusual and ungrammatical sentence:

- # "El/ella está lloviendo" ("he/she is raining")

In Norwegian the requirement for inclusion of expletive pronouns are strict in the example given above, where an subject is missing altogether, but may be optional in other cases:

(1) "Her kommer en hund" ("Here comes a dog")

(2) "Her kommer DET en hund" ("Here comes a dog")

Note that the English translation is identical for both cases. This is not to say that there is absolutely no difference as to whether or how the expletive pronoun is used or perceived; Of the two sentences above (2) seems to me a more common in speech, whereas (1) sounds more formal. Apart from that they are quite similar. Now, if we replace the subject, the indefinite noun "a dog" with a noun in the definite form, "the dog", the situation becomes another:

(1) "Her kommer hunden" ("Here comes the dog")

(2) # "Her kommer DET hunden" ("Here comes the dog")

This may seem to reflect an overall ban in formal Norwegian on the use of expletive pronouns in the same clause as a noun in the definite form.

In cases where the expletive pronoun is topicalized it is obligatory to include it:

(1) "DET kommer en tid når..." ("There comes a time when...")

(2) # "Kommer en tid når..." ("Comes a time when...")

Now, let's take a look at an example from my narration of "Simon's Cat":

[link to annotated text]

The part of interest here is "og der kommer det en flue" (and there comes a fly), which presents a typical case of optional use of the expletive pronoun "det".

To clarify (or confuse?) the situation I will include an example to illustrate how "det" should not be identified uniquely as the expletive pronoun. In many cases it is used anaphorically (to pick up the content of an antecedent, or referent); in others words, non-expletively, as below:

Here we should look for the phrase "og den klarer det nesten" (and it almost manages to). In this case we can ask "WHAT does it almost manage to?" to get the answer "To catch the fly" (the antecedent from the previous phrase). So we have a case of reference, and hence, not expletive use. However, if we try asking such questions in any of the examples above we will have no straight-forward answer: "WHAT is raining?"

This type of questions may serve as a litmus test when deciding whether or not we are dealing with an expletive pronoun.

 --Eirik Zahl 23:35, 6 March 2014 (UTC)

Agreement

In the course of the story we find two cases of agreement that are different with respect to a single feature. It shows, quite neatly, how agreement works in norwegian and how it affects syntactical composition of Norwegian. In sentence 6 we find this noun phrase [4]:

Our focus in the above sentence is "En annen hund - Another dog (eng)"

In sentence 7, however, we find this noun phrase

Our focus in the above sentence is "Den andre hunden - The other dog (eng)"

It should be relatively clear that the only difference between the two noun phrases is one of definiteness. In both cases the controller is the word hund, which means dog and is the head of the phrase. The noun phrase, accordingly, is the domain of agreement. The word hund in itself carries only the feature of masculine (MASC), and definiteness is impossible to determine through this word alone. However, an indefinite article has been chosen, namely en, and thus renders the noun indefinite. En becomes a target for the controller and agrees with the feature MASC. Therefore it carries the two features MASC and indefinite (INDEF). The adjective annen, which means other in English, is also a target for the controller and therefore has to agree in both the features MASC and INDEF.

This can be seen by comparing it to the other noun phrase in sentence 7. Here the word hund has gained the additional morpheme -en. This is the definite article in Norwegian, and so the word now holds two features in itself, namely MASC and DEF. An interesting point is that there is still a preceding article den which also marks definiteness, irrespective of the presence of the definite suffix. This is called double definiteness, and it surfaces when the noun is modified by an adjective. Regardless, this den is affected by the controller and gains the feature MASC. The adjective is also affected by the controller and gathers the features of MASC and DEF. Because of this, it changes form from annen to andre, which is a definite form of the word.

--Anders Lynghaug Haugen 21:49, 16 February 2014 (UTC)

Clause Linkage

There are a number of different forms of clause linkage that can be found throughout the story. Let ut first look at sentence number 2 [5]:

The phrasal structure that we are interested in is the following: [Han spanet et slakterhus] og [smatt raskt inn] og [stjal et stort, fint, saftig bein fra hyllen]

The brackets here mark the boundaries of the clauses, whether independent or embedded in the sentence. In this sentence we can see by the bracketing that we have three clauses within the sentence. They need to be in this order because of temporal and causal restrictions, but syntactically speaking, they are independent of one another. In this sense, they are parallel to each other, and this is marked through the use of og, which acts as a coordinating conjunction. This is a phenomenon called parataxis.

For another form of clause linkage, let's again look at sentence 6 [6]. Here we find this noun phrase:

En annen hund [[nøyaktig lik ham] som hold et bein i munnen sin]

The linked clause is the part between the brackets. This clause is complex because the phrase en annen hund works fine on its own. The part in the brackets is thus a modifying element. Nøyaktig lik ham is an adjectival expression which can be overlooked for this purpose. However, the part som holdt et bein i munnen sin is rather important, because it is initiated through the use of the subordinating conjunction som. This results in a downgrading which causes this clause to lack a subject, because this is taken to be the head of the noun phrase that the relative clause is subordinated to.

Yet another form of clause linkage is found in sentence 3 [7]:

[Mens han tygget lykkelig på beinet] sprang han inn i skogen.

In this example, the clause within the brackets is adverbial. It is not needed by the main verb, which is sprang, and is therefore not embedded in the sentence. In spite of this it is introduced by a conjunction fucntions as a temporal adverb. Because it is subordinate to the main event. This would a type of clause linkage that could be said to be halfway between parataxis and embedding.

Finally we have sentence 7 [8]. Here we fin this portion:

Den grådige hunden bestemte seg for [at han ville ha det beinet óg...]

In this complex clause, the part within the brackets is completely embedded within the sentence. This is because the clause within the brackets is absolutely necessary to fulfill the valency of the main verb bestemte seg for, i.e. it fills a grammatical slot predicated by the main verb. The clause acts as a complement to the verb and is therefore an embedded clause and totally dependent on the main verb in this sentence. It is the subordinating conjunction at that introduces the embedded element.

For the above paragraph phrases need to be embedded and 'Embedding' still needs to be distinguished correctly from 'Government' --Dorothee Beermann 17:23, 22 February 2014 (UTC)

--Anders Lynghaug Haugen 21:49, 16 February 2014 (UTC)

Word order

Norwegian is typically viewed as a highly configurational language, i.e. it has relatively rigid and fixed word order. Generally, this word order is recognised as SVO or Subject-Verb-Object. Because of this, nouns hold little morphology as to their role in the sentence since this can be inferred from their position within the sentence. Here is an example of a standard Norwegian sentence with such a construction.

In this sentence han is the subject, så is the verb and en annen hund is the object. This is the most common sentence construction one typically finds in Norwegian. However, deviations from this are absolutely possible.

A speaker can, for instance, topicalise an element. When a speaker utilizes topicalisation, the topicalised element is fronted to the first position of the sentence. This could very well be the syntactical object. This is usually accompanied with a stronger intonation to signal its topicalisation. Interestingly, the verbs in such sentence retain their position, so often times the object and the subject simply swap places. This has led to many calling Norwegian a V2 language i.e. the verb always holds the second position in the sentence. Here is an example of topicalisation. The topicalised element being in italics.

Det tror jeg ikke. - I don't believe that (That, I don't believe)

Another common sentence structure that is often used in Norwegian is the question form. The sentence structure of questions is intersting because it militates against the V2 assumption. When one asks a question in Norwegian one can do something called a verb inversion. You move the verb to the first position such that you get the structure VSO. Compare the two sentences.

Du leser avisa - You are reading the newspaper

Leser du avisa? - Are you reading the newspaper?

There are other instances where the verb seems to come before the subject. In narration, where you tend to start your sentences with any temporal adverb it is common that the verb comes before the subject. Possibly to retain its position in the sentence as the second element, since the temporal adverb would be the first. Here is an example of such a construction.

In this sentence we find og så finner hun flua til slutt where hun follows the verb, irrespective of the fact that it is the subject. You also find og da hopper hun på gardinene, where again the verb precedes the subject. They both have in common that they are introduced by a temporal adverb. This whole text is a narration of a video, and it has a lot of examples where this type of construction occurs.

--Anders Lynghaug Haugen 00:38, 7 March 2014 (UTC)

Reflexive pronouns in Norwegian

Please make the necessary stylistic changes to the paragraph below and copy edit! --Dorothee Beermann 17:30, 22 February 2014 (UTC)

One may divide reflexive pronouns in Norwegian into two categories; 1) forms containing a personal pronoun, such as "hans" or "hennes" , and 2) form containing a noun plus reflexive pronoun "sin". To the first group belong:

-han (personal pronoun, masculine) + sin (reflexive pronoun) -> hans (eng: his)

-henne (personal pronoun, feminine)+ sin (reflexive pronoun) -> hennes (eng: her)

It seems that the reflexive marker "sin" (eng: possessive "'s")has become cliticalized into "s", so that the forms "hans" and "hennes" have replaced "han sin" and "henne sin" both in writing and speech.

In the second group we find typically nouns instead of pronouns:

-Mozart (personal noun) + sin = Mozarts (eng: Mozart's)

-hunden (common noun) + sin = hundens (eng: the dog's)

For this group both forms, "hunden sin" and "hundens" may be used in free variation.

In terms of agreement, the reflexive pronoun "sin" takes its values of GENDER and NUMBER from its controller, the succeeding noun, as seen in the examples below:

"Vindu" spreads its values NEUTER and SINGULAR to "sitt", so that they agree on these features.

When the object "vinduer" is in the plural, then so is the reflexive "sine". "Mannen" is in singular, and does not agree with either.

The reflexive "sitt" is in the singular to agree with its controller, which must be "vinduer", the head of this noun phrase. This could suggest that the head rather than its specifier "mennene" is controller that spreads its values of the features GENDER and NUMBER.

The same control relation also goes for phrases containing the reflexive determiner "egen" (eng:own) in addition to "sin" :

"Window" spreads its values NEUTER and SINGULAR to "eget", so that they agree.

When the controller "vinduer" is in the plural, then so is the reflexive "egne". The specifier, "mannen", is in the singular.

Here we see the opposite case: controller "vindu" and controllee "eget" are in the singular and neuter while the specifier is in the plural and masculine.

This is a purely syntactical analysis for the properties of sin and eget. In this respect we try to show that agreement occurs with the noun phrase it modifies. In the phrase mannen sitt vindu, (the man's window) the word sitt modifies the word vindu and therefore garners its features of SINGULAR and NEUTER. In the phrase mannen sine vinduer(the man's windows) the word has changed and acquired the features Plural and NEUTER. This, we postulate, is the syntactic relation of which the word abides by. In other words, the controller is the word vindu, which spreads it's feature. However we believe that the word holds another relation, which is one of semantics. In this relation the word sin is reflexive in nature and refers back to the word mannnen, even though there is no morphosyntactic evidence to support this.

For the word hans and hennes we have, as we have mentioned, assumed that it is a contracted form of han sin and henne sin. As a result, the words have more encoded meaning. By comparison of Hans and hennes we have morphological evidence for gender. In the sentence mannen sitt vindu we could substitute the word mannen sitt with hans and we see that the NEUTER aspect from vindu is lost. On the other hand, a masculine gender has been specified. If we had a modified sentence, such as mannen og hans vindu (the man and his window) we can see that hans gets the feature MASC from Mannen, as opposed to sin which would get it's gender from vindu in the sentence mannen sitt vindu. Therefore, we can see that the syntactical relation is different for words such as hans and hennes, where the controller of the agreement is different.

Agreement statistics

Agreement statistics are discussed at Agreement statistics

Auxiliary verb constructions

Auxiliary verbs are an analytical way of expressing grammatical information. In Norwegian, they are necessary for expressing some modalities and temporal placements.

There are varying conventions for partitioning the auxiliary verbs into groups. One way is to group them into modal and perfective auxiliaries.

Perfective auxiliaries usually require their complement (the following verb in the verb sequence) to be in the perfect past. Modal auxiliaries usually require their complement to infinite.

^[1]

"ble" (å bli, to be) is a perfective auxiliary. "veltet" (å velte, to topple) has identical preterite and perfect forms, but is here tagged as perfect.

"fikk" (å få, to get) is a perfective auxiliary, and its complement "revet" (å rive, to rip) is in the perfect past.

"skulle" (would(?)) is a modal auxiliary. Its complement, "(å) vise" (to show), is infinite.

"har" (å ha, to have) is perfective. This is reflected in a perfect past complement, both "skjedd" (å skje, to happen) and "gjort" (å gjøre, to do).

There are potential exceptions, though they do not occur in this text. One example, though, is "skulle reist". Here, a modal is followed by a perfect past. A theory is that an infinite perfective auxiliary "ha" has disappeared in the middle; "skulle (ha) reist" is still grammatical, and has the same semantic meaning.

1. ↑ Tor A. Åfarli, Kristin M. Eide, Norsk generativ syntaks, Novus forlag (2003).

Nicklas Nilsen 04:04, 6 March 2014 (UTC)