People
Kaja Borthen (PI)
Norwegian University of Science and Technology
Kaja Borthen is the principal investigator of The Meaning and Function of Norwegian Tags (NOT). In addition to pragmatic particles, Borthen is interested in pragmatics and semantics in general, and she has worked on topics such as reference and implicatures. She wrote her PhD thesis on the syntax and semantics of Norwegian bare singulars. You can find more publications by Kaja here and here.
Christoph Unger works on theoretical pragmatics and procedural meaning. Within the NOT-project, he has worked on topics such as the interaction between social meaning and procedural meaning and the analysis of miratives. Together with Borthen, Johannessen, and Weston, he works on the particles visst, ass and altså. Unger is also interested in German ja and doch, cross-linguistic comparison of particles. Moreover, he works on the pragmatics of allegory and extended metaphor. You can find more publications by Unger here.
Perlaug Marie Kveen is working on a survey of the geographical distribution of tag particles in spoken Norwegian. She also works on the meaning of the tag particle da mata. Kvenn has an MA in Scandinavian Linguistics that focuses on prosody and tonemes in the Norwegian dialects spoken in Lom, and the last couple of years she has been working on a PhD on prosody in the Norwegian dialect spoken in Nord-Gudbrandsdalen. She has a keen interest in research methods. You can find more publications by Perlaug here.
Perlaug Marie Kveen
Norwegian University of Science and Technology
Christoph Unger
Norwegian University of Science and Technology
Within the NOT-project, Signe Rix Berthelin works on the meaning of jo and da. She is especially interested in the difference between sentence internal and tag position. She is also the project web-editor. Berthelin works at the Department of Teacher Education. In addition to Norwegian, she has worked on Inuit dialects in Canada and Alaska, and she has a keen interest in multilingualism, second language education, teaching materials and popular scientific dissemination. Her PhD thesis from 2017 is a fieldwork based study of modals in Uummarmiutun. She is also interested in cross-dialectal semantics. You can find Berthelin's publications here.
Åshild Søfteland works on the particle sjø in the Norwegian dialect Trøndersk together with Borthen. Søfteland also contributed to data collection and analysis, and to the computational linguistic tasks, including searchable databases and maps of the distributions of particles in Norwegian dialects. For many years, Søfteland was affiliated with the Text Laboratory, and her PhD thesis from 2014 focuses on grammatical and pragmatic aspects of spoken Norwegian. Søfteland works at the Faculty of Education at Østfold University College where she, among many other things, develops projects within interdisciplinary language didactics. Søfteland's publications can be found here.
Elena Karagjosova worked on NOT in the early days of the project. She identified relevant particles and developed questionnaires together with Borthen, and she recruited respondents and implemented an online version of the questionnaires. Karagjosova and Borthen conducted a comparative study on tag da and the German and English translational equivalents. Recently, Karagjosova has used some of the results from the project in her own diachronic and comparative research on connectives and temporal expressions. You can find Karagjosova's publications here.
Åshild Søfteland
Østfold University College
Signe Rix Berthelin
Norwegian University of Science and Technology
Elena Karagjosova
Freie Universität Berlin
Maria Boer Johannessen works on sociolinguistic aspects of the particle ass together with Borthen, Weston, and Unger. She has investigated how the particle is used by different age groups, especially in the Oslo-area. Johannessen has an MA in English Linguistics with a thesis on code switching. A summary of the main findings is available here (in Norwegian). Other publications by Johannessen can be found here.
Maria Boer Johannessen
Norwegian University of Science and Technology
Other people who have contributed to the project are: Cecilie Slinning Knudsen, Aleksander Eidsmo, Espen Utne Landgraff, and Åshild Klepsvik.
The project is lucky to have had the following people on the advisory board: Daniel Weston (NTNU), Brit Kirsten Mæhlum (NTNU), Tor Erik Jenstad (NTNU), Jan Svennevig (UiO), Øystein Alexander Vangsnes (UiT), Karin Aijmer (GU), and Regina Blass (AIU).