Íslenskt mál og almenn málfræði - 01.01.2010, Blaðsíða 123

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Two Changes in Faroese
changing faster than Icelandic, for instance. In the next section I will pre-
sent evidence for such changes.
3- The empirical research
3-1. The methodology
The present study is based on data from two different sources, namely
gtammaticality judgment tests and database inquiries.
To elicit the judgments, questionnaires were distributed to 198 infor-
^aants from six different dialect areas on the Faroe Islands. The infor-
cnants had different levels of education and they were divided into three
age groups (15-35, 36-55. 56+).5 The subjects were asked to judge the
sentences in Table3 and Table 12 below (see section 3.2 and section 3.3).
^hese sentences were distributed between other sentence types, both
gtammatical and ungrammatical. The subjects were asked to select one of
the following four possibilities:
Ö) 1. setningurin er fullkomiliga rættur
‘the sentence is completely correct’
2- setningurin er rættur, men eg hevði ikki brúkt hann sjálv/ur
‘the sentence is correct, but I would not use it myself
3- setningurin er ivasamur
‘the sentence is doubtful’
4- setningurin er fullkomiliga skeivur
‘the sentence is completely wrong’
the database inquiries two text-corpora were used. The first one,
p0royskt TekstaSavn (FTS), contains material from the Faroese news-
Paper Dimmahztting 1998. It includes 2,853 articles and 767 of these are
etters from the readers and 2,098 are articles written by journalists. The
°ther corpus, FAE_SOSIALURIN, consists of all the issues of the
haroese newspaper Sosialurin 2004, approximately 112,000 words. In
^he discussion I also refer to material in Bandasavnið, a collection of
'nterviews from the late 1960S and early 1970S.
This data was collected during a data collection workshop in August 2008, sup-
P°tted by the Scandinavian research network NORMS (Nordic Center of Excellence in
*cr°comparative Syntax). During this workshop, linguists from all the Nordic countries
different locations on the Faroe Islands to collect data and interview informants
°rshavn, Fuglafjprður, Klaksvík, Tvproyri, Sandur, Miðvágur).