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This website replaces the former website of the project, which was published during the period with funding from the Norwegian Research Council 2000 - 2003. Most of the pages of the old website have by now become more or less obsolete. What is of interest today, five years after the formal termination of the project, is its results in the form of scientific publications and the database of sound files.
Norsk Tonelagstypologi received a three years' grant from the Norwegian Research Council from 2000 to 2003. The project had two principal aims. The first was to provide better and more dependable knowledge on how the tonal accent contrast is realized phonetically in different dialects. Based on this knowledge base, we further wanted to explore to what extent the different dialects could be accounted for within the bounds of one basic structural analysis, where the dialect variation would flow from e.g. minimally different rankings of the same constraint set.
The project was led by professor Gjert Kristoffersen, Dept. of Scandinavian languages and literature at the University of Bergen. Partners in the project were associate professor Ove Lorentz at the University of Tromsø and associate professor Jan K. Hognestad at the Agder University College (now University of Agder).
Within the funding period we did not fully attain the goals set out in the project description. But as publications from the project now have started to appear, we can safely say that our knowledge both of the dialect variation and the possiblity of constructing a coherent structural and diachronic analysis of this variation has progressed.
An inherent weakness of the project was that we underrated the resources, both financial and with respect to time, needed in order to establish a satisfactory data coverage across all regions. The resulting database has a decent coverage of the western part of Norway, while the northern and eastern part of the country are less well covered. For East Norway recent recordings made in connection with other projects supplement those made within this project.
The data consists of recordings of speakers from different dialects, all senior high school students, who read a set of target words inserted into carrier phrases. The recordings have all been digitized and split into smaller files, each containing one phrase. The files have all been labeled by means of a database, which today consists of 15644 items. If we obtain funding, the sound files will be made available on the internet for other researchers in 2008.