Workshop for PhD students and young researchers

Grand Meeting for Scandinavian Dialect Syntax
Leikanger, 25 August 2005

The use of the definite article in some dialects in Nyland

Magnus Brenner, University of Helsinki

The Swedish dialects of Nyland in Finland are said to belong to an area where the suffixed definite article is used more frequently or “extended” compared to standard Swedish. However, in Nyland the article is not used as frequently as in some more northern dialects: for example those in Österbotten in Finland and in Norrland in Sweden.

In my presentation I will discuss the use of the definite article in Nyland based on some recordings of dialect speakers. As has been mentioned in the literature, the article is sometimes used in defining or naming objects, in generic NPs, in some semantic fields, in possessive NPs and in non-referential NPs. However, there seems to be some variation in the use of the article and some uses seem hard to classify.