Inaug.-diss.--Freiburg i. Br. / No more published. "Handschriften und Ausgaben färöischer Gedichte": p. [13]-19.

Written broadly within a Lexical Functional Grammar Framework, this thesis provides a descriptive and theoretical account of definiteness in Insular Scandinavian from a synchronic and diachronic perspective. Providing evidence from Ancient Germanic to Old Norse to Modern Faroese, it is argued that the weak feature on the adjective has an important part to play in the historical narrative of definiteness marking in Faroese, alongside more traditional elements like the bound and free definite articles and demonstratives. Each of the features is read within the context of its nominal syntax and it is observed that there are recurrent pathways of change which each time result in the growth of syntactic structure and the redistribution of features. One of my principal findings for the Old Norse period was that the noun phrase had developed a FOC slot to the left edge of phrase. It is this focus domain which helps to explain the distribution of definiteness markers and which provides an account for the grammaticalization of the free and bound marker hinn. It is also this focus domain which eventually leads to the development of dedicated definite slots in the prenominal space and eventually to functional DP projection in Modern Faroese. This thesis provides new and detailed descriptive data on the definite noun phrase in Modern Faroese, a lesser studied Insular Scandinavian language. Since Faroese is widely reported to have ‘lost’ the genitive case in recent times, the above changes are read against a background of morphosyntactic change. A key finding of the thesis for the Modern language is that Faroese is becoming increasingly reliant on analytic marking, despite the fact that is is still a highly inflected language. It is this reliance on syntax which has rendered the genitive redundant, not, as has been suggested, the ‘loss’ of case which has led to the development of periphrastic alternatives.

This paper explores heritage killing in the practice of Grindadráp (pilot whale hunting),revealing its relevance to Faroese regional identity. My aim is to identify ‘heritage killing’ inthree aspects; killing is heritage, heritage kills, and heritage is being killed to show the role itplays in the heritage practice of Grindadráp and in turn, how all the different aspects of ‘heritagekilling’ can influence the Faroese identity. I will use the qualitative method of one-on-one subjectinterviews to acquire; beliefs, values, rituals and traditions of the Faroese people, gainingvaluable indigenous data. In this research process, uncovering the people of the Faroe Islands tobe authentically; nature-based, socially bonded within their community, and sustainable intraditions which make up their identity.

This paper examines the artist Sámal Joensen-Mikines (1906-1979) and how he and his work manifest Faroese national identity. The theoretical background used in thispaper is Anthony D. Smiths theory on the potential of art to reproduce and re-interpret national identity. He describes three different elements of how this can be achieved in art – evocation, commemoration and didactic. The paper examines the form, style and subject of three of Mikines’ paintings from this theoretical perspective, as well as how the artist positions himself and how he is positioned by critics and experts both during and after his lifetime. The results show that his home island Mykines and his identity as Faroese are central for Mikines and his work. His artwork is clearly identified as Faroese by experts, and he has a strong position in the Faroese art world. The form and style of his work is international, strongly inspired by Nordic and European artists, and he uses this as his language to communicate Faroese national identity in form of evocation and commemoration to both a Faroese and an international audience.

Cross-lingual transfer learning has been the driving force of low-resource natural language processing in recent years, relying on massively multilingual language models with hopes of solving the data scarcity issue for languages with a limited digital presence. However, this "one-size-fits-all" approach is not equally applicable to all low-resource languages, suggesting limitations of such models in cross-lingual transfer. Besides, known similarities and phylogenetic relationships between source and target languages are often overlooked. In this work, the emphasis is placed on Faroese, a low-resource North Germanic language with several closely related resource-rich sibling languages. The cross-lingual transfer potential from these strong Scandinavian source candidates, as well as from additional genetically related, geographically proximate, and syntactically similar source languages is studied in single-source and multi-source experiments, in terms of Faroese syntactic parsing and part-of-speech tagging. In addition, the effect of task-specific fine-tuning on monolingual, linguistically informed smaller multilingual, and massively multilingual pre-trained language models is explored. The results suggest Icelandic as a strong source candidate, however, only when fine-tuning a monolingual model. With multilingual models, task-specific fine-tuning in Norwegian and Swedish seems even more beneficial. Although they do not surpass fully Scandinavian fine-tuning, models trained on genetically related and syntactically similar languages produce good results. Additionally, the findings indicate that multilingual models outperform models pre-trained on a single language, and that even better results can be achieved using a smaller, linguistically informed model, compared to a massively multilingual one.

The Faroes are a rural, ’closely-knit’ (Nils Christie 1982), and unexplored society. Hardly anyone is a stranger. Neither are police officers and offenders. How does this affect policing? Based on 6 interviews with Faroese police officers and 3interviews with Faroese offenders, the ’living law’ (i.e., social norm) of Connection Seeking was identified. Analysis was done phenomenologically with thematic analysis and content analysis. The ’living law’ of Connection Seeking is a law that officers must heed to stay connected with society. This includes being friendly and behaving properly. To a high degree, Faroese officers succeed, sometimes at the expense of ‘law in books’ and ‘law in action’. Danish officers in the Faroes, however, fare worse. Findings suggest that Faroese officers show their Camaraderie and Appropriate Behaviour by being lenient, sympathetic, and trusting, among others, and that the ‘living law’ of Connection Seeking is a prevalent law in officers’ and offenders’ life-worlds. / Føroyar eru fjarskotið, ”tætt knýtt” (Nils Christie 1982) og órannsakað samfelag. At kalla ongin er ókunnur. Eiheldur løgreglumenn og brotsmenn. Hvussu ávirkar hetta løgverjuna? Við seks viðtølum við føroyskar løgreglumenn og trimum við føroyskar brotsmenn varð ”livandi løgini” sambandssókn eyðmerkt. Greingina varð gjørt fyribrygdafrøðiliga við evnisgreining og innihaldsgreining. Livandi løgini sambandssókn eru løg, sum løgreglumaður má lýða til tess at halda samband við samfelagið. At lýða hesum løgum ber við sær at vera vinaligur og at bera seg rætt at. Í stóran mun eydnast hetta føroyskum løgreglumonnum, stundum við tí at skeita ”bókaløgum” og ”verkløgum” minni ans. Donskum løgreglumonnum í Føroyum hilnast verri. Fundirnir benda á, at føroyskir løgreglumenn sýna vinalag og góðan atburð millum annað við at vera lagaligir, várkunnsamir og við at líta á fólkið, og at livandi løgini sambandssókn eru løg, sum eru frammarlaga í æviheimi løgreglumanna og brotsmanna.

Faroese is known to lie grammatically between Icelandic and the Mainland Scandinavian languages and dialects. One example of this is that, on the one hand, Faroese is like Icelandic in having a basically intact morphological four case system. On the other hand case-marking in Faroese is linked to clause function to a greater degree than in Icelandic – but to a lesser degree than in the Mainland Scandinavian standard languages. In Scandinavian Linguistics, it has long been an axiom that in the longer term the aforementioned four case system will be reduced in all varieties of the Scandinavian languages. The present thesis investigates if, and if so how, this expected development manifests itself in Senior High School graduation essays in Faroese from the period 1940–1999. A quantitative study forms the core of the thesis. The choice between the dative and other cases is related to eight syntactic variables whose effect on the choice of case is compared using methods from the variationist framework, among others. The results are partly surprising: the dative did not reduce in frequency from the 1940s to 1990s. There certainly is a tendency, however not a statistically significant one, that the dative is more often replaced by another case in contexts where the norm is to use the dative. On the other hand it also seems to become more common for the dative to be used hypercorrectly. Furthermore, the development is not linear, in that around the middle of the investigation period, the dative is used far more according to norms than otherwise. As expected, clause function is an important variable, but by the end of the period under investigation the placement of the nominal phrase within the clause becomes a surprisingly strong factor. It also becomes more important if the phrase takes the form of a first/second-person pronominal or not. The results are theoretically interpreted in the light of, firstly, Generative Grammar, and secondly Construction Grammar. The modification of certain terms is discussed, such as lexical case in Generative Grammar or usage-based model in Construction Grammar. The conclusion is that the linguistic descriptive models of these theories can only partly cover the tendencies to change that are observed. Other parts of the results are best explained using aspects of sociolinguistics. The conclusion is that case studies on a micro-level are valuable in order to evaluate and develop theories of linguistic variation and change at a macro-level.