The Nordic research infrastructure for syntactic variation: Possibilities, limitations and achievements

Abstract

The Scandinavian Dialect Syntax project was a collaboration between ten research groups from all of the five Nordic countries lasting for a period of about ten years. Besides resulting in a large number of scientific papers and theses on a range of different topics, a concrete outcome of the collaboration was the establishment of lasting research infrastructures in terms of two databases: the Nordic Dialect Corpus (NDC) and the Nordic Syntax Database (NSD). This paper first describes the two infrastructures and then proceeds to showcase how they may be used for the exploration of two selected dialect syntactic topics: the relative placement of sentence adverbs and infinitive markers (±split infinitives) across varieties of Mainland North Germanic, and the lack of Verb Second in wh-questions across Norwegian dialects.