marco@work - Abstract TIN-dag 2005

This is the abstract for my presentation at the Linguistics in the Netherlands (TIN)-dag. It is a short version of my previous abstract.

Measuring syntactic variation in Dutch dialects

Name: Marco René Spruit
Title: Measuring syntactic variation in Dutch dialects
Affiliation: Meertens Instituut

In this dialectometric research project, a measure of syntactic distance is developed and applied to Dutch dialects. Methods to assign numerical values to linguistic phenomena in order to aggregate individual dialect differences were first described in Seguy 1971 and Goebl 1984. Until recently, dialectometric research was mainly limited to lexical and phonological data because no extensive collection of syntactic data was available. However, with the Syntactic Atlas of the Dutch Dialects (Barbiers et al. 2005) a wealth of data with respect to syntactic variation in 267 Dutch dialects has become available. A subset including anaphoric and pronominal data has been used to obtain the first results described here. The number of differences between pairs of locations is determined to obtain a measurement based on binary comparisons between feature variants. Multidimensional scaling and cluster analysis are applied to interpret the resulting distance matrix. These procedures reveal a continuum which provides new insights in the degree of geographical coherence in syntactic variation.