Experimental and quantitative approaches to linguistic variation
This research group has a solid background in Scandinavian syntactic microvariation, with close connections to the previous largescale dialect syntax projects in Scandinavia (e.g. ScanDiaSyn). In the last couple of years, the focus has been on developing new methods for collecting dialect data that goes beyond previously used methods (grammaticality judgments and spoken language collection), for example large scale spoken elicitation (see the Nordic Word order Database, https://tekstlab.uio.no/nwd) and language processing experiments using e.g. eye tracking, targeting dialect separation within speakers. In addition, we develop methods for correlating syntactic variation with morpho-phonological and phonetic variation. The overall goal is to understand how speakers manage to associate less frequent syntactic patterns to dialect grammars in a society where speakers are exposed to several "lects" on a daily basis.