34. Research results from on-line dialect databases and dynamic dialect maps

EuropeanDialect Syntax: Towards an infrastructure for documentation and research of endangered dialects

“…For several reasons, morphosyntactic variation is more of a terra incognita (cf. Barbiers & Goeman 2013). First, dialect speakers themselves are usually much less aware of morphosyntactic variation than they are of phonetic and lexical variation.…”

“…From the 1950s onwards, syntax was considered the preserve of generative linguistics, the primary goal of which was not to describe language variation but rather to discover the universal principles of natural language (cf. Barbiers 2013). However, during the 1970s and 1980s, developing a general theory of syntactic variation became a more and more prominent goal (cf.…”