Rit (Vísindafélag Íslendinga) - 01.06.1970, Page 440

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has certain drawbacks—one may go on for hours without
drawing out a specific word or linguistic form which un-
doubtedly exists5—the study of an extensive corpus of con-
nected, spontaneous speech can give many new insights. For
certain purposes, for example, the study of syntax, word
frequency, and morphology, it is essential or at least highly
preferable. It may contribute to our knowledge of the spoken
language in general: in stylistic matters, such as the use of
direct or indirect quotation, over- and understatement, and
the use of imagery; in syntactic matters, such as hesitation
phenomena, pausing and anacoluthons, word order, the
character and frequency of subordinate clauses, and the use
of the passive and the genitive; and in lexical matters, such as
vocabulary and word frequency. The teaching of good
Swedish usage in the schools and other institutions may profit
from data on the occurrence and distribution of such syntactic
structures as the double supine, concatenations (satsjlátor) ,6
and the use of the oblique forms of personal pronouns after
the comparative conjunctions án and sorn. All these are being
actively discouraged in the schools, as are the colloquial
possessive pronouns váran, -at and eran, -at and the coalescence
of short /0/ and \u\ in words like rösta and rusta. Unsystematic
observations made during work on the material up to now
suggest that these phenomena are extremely frequent. Prob-
ably very few people, except teachers of Swedish, try to avoid
constructions like han har válfátt hört attjag ár sjuk.
The impact of the written language upon the spoken langu-
age may be shown by contrasting, for instance, the allomorphic
5An instance of this is the dialectal form stagi (past part. of std), which is not
recorded in the material, although I have heard it uttered several times by old
people. In cases in which the recorded material gives too little or no evidence
as to the existence of an alternative form or paradigm, supplementary directed
interviews must be arranged.
6I have tried, in vain, to find an exact English equivalent of satsfl&ta (literally,
‘braided sentence’). Concatenation is here used for constructions such as den boken
undrar jag om den ar bra.