Methods in Dialectology 14

Contact
methods14@uwo.ca

 

Workshops
« DIALECT AND REGIOLECT SYNTAX»

Alexandra Lenz (Vienna, Austria), Helmut Weiß (Frankfurt, Germany), Jürg Fleischer (Marburg, Germany)

The Deadline for submission of abstracts is 31 December, 2010.

Scope of Session

Following the impulses of Kayne's theory of micro-variation, a broad spectrum of areal syntactic studies and projects with predominant theoretical interests and objectives has emanated over the last 20 years (s. Bayer 1984, Benincà 1989, Abraham & Bayer 1993, Black & Motapanyane 1996, Barbiers et al. 2002, Tortora 2002, Haegeman 1992, Henry 1995, Zanuttini 1997, Poletto 2000). Overall, areal syntactic projects have broadened the empiric basis of modern linguistics and have shown that areal syntax provides very fruitful insights for different linguistic disciplines. A central aim of this workshop is to combine and discuss experiences, results and problems of current areal syntactic projects and papers. Thereby we strive towards a mixture of theoretically aligned contributions by linguists of different theoretical backgrounds as well as more empirically based papers. But the session is not limited to the syntax of dialects as the "deepest" pole of the continuum of colloquial speech; rather it is the second central goal of the workshop also to focus on the syntax of "higher" (regiolectal) varieties approaching the standard. Including this vertical dimension represents an innovative approach to the investigation of variation in syntax.

Three groups of central research questions will be discussed in the presentations:

I. Questions regarding the horizontal (areal) dimension of syntax:
What are the horizontal-areal structures of dialect syntax? How do these syntactic areal structures correspond to "traditional" dialect-geographic areas defined mainly on the basis of phonetic/phonological data? How do the linguistic areal structures correspond to other "extralinguistic" (e.g., geographic, political or social) areas?

II: Questions regarding the vertical (social) dimension of syntax:
How do syntactic structures vary along the vertical axis of non-standard spectra of varieties? What does the syntax of intermediate (regiolectal) varieties between dialects and standard languages look like? To what extent does the syntax of intermediate varieties differ from the syntax of the dialects and standard varieties, respectively? Which "vertical structure(s)" can be hypothesized on the basis of syntactic data? Does the syntactic level provide evidence for different varieties on the vertical axis or is there a syntactic continuum from the base dialects up to the standard languages? To what extent is syntactic variation in line with what we find for phonetic and phonological data?

III. Questions regarding the implications for syntactic theory:
How can variation be modelled within structural or cognitive theories? Where is the locus of variation (lexicon, morphology, syntactic structures)? What is the consequence for the concept of competence?


 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

References
Abraham, Werner / Bayer, Josef (eds.) (1993): Dialektsyntax (Linguistische Berichte, Sonderheft 5). Opladen.

 

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