Sydösterbottnisk syntax by Ann-Marie Ivars (review)

Ann-Marie Ivars's Sydösterbottnisk syntax is a very thorough description of the syntax of several variants of the dialect spoken in the Finnish region of Ostrobothnia along the Bothnian Sea from Närpes in the north to the area surrounding Kristinestad in the south.

Most of the data consists of a large corpus of interviews, stories, and shorter folktales recorded by the author during several periods of extensive fieldwork from 1967 to 1982. The author has also occasionally used data from other sources. All examples are given in phonemic transcription followed by a translation into standard Swedish. In order to ensure that the data would be representative of the dialect of Ostrobothnia, the informants chosen were individuals born between 1889 and 1930 who would not have had extensive education in the standard.

The author's aim is to show how phrases and sentences are constructed in the dialect of southern Ostrobothnia. Her description follows the theoretical model of the grammar published by the Swedish Academy (Svenska akademiens Grammatik), which makes her work accessible to a wide linguistic audience. The volume's seven detailed chapters cover nominal phrases, adjective phrases, verb phrases, interjective phrases, subordinate clauses, main clauses, negation, dislocation, the expletive "det," and complex sentences. A five-page reference list rounds out the study.

Ann-Marie Ivars is to be commended for her thoroughness overall and especially for the extent of the data used in the eighty-fourth volume of the Studier i nordisk filologi. It is a welcome addition to the study of Swedish dialects in general and to Finnish-Swedish dialects in particular. It will engage researchers and all those interested in the study of Swedish dialects.