Abstract Cecilia Poletto

Field work in formal syntax: what dialectology can provide to our understanding of internal and external grammar

The aim of the course is to show how formal questions can be answered through a careful investigation of non standard closely related languages. We will start from Kayne’s observation that a comparison among very similar languages is the closest instrument to a scientific experiment we possess in linguistics, because it allows to have few factors varying while the majority of the grammatical properties remains constant. In order to be able to use correctly this potentially very powerful tool that dialectology offers, it is necessary to be able to exclude a number of interfering factors.
I will outline the methodology used for the ASIS project, which concentrates on an area where informants clearly distinguish between dialect and standard language, and start from the choice of the informants and then move to the stepwise system which goes from general to specific questionnaires and will examine two cases in which variation has proven interesting: a) the case of interrogative clauses and b) the case of imperatives.
It will be shown that there is a fundamental difference in the investigation of structures which are obligatory and are spontaneously produced by informants without any particular special device and structures which optionally alternate with others, which are much more difficult to elicit and require an appropriate context.

References

ASIS: Syntactic Atlas of Northern Italian Dialects. http://asis-cnr.unipd.it

Cornips, Leonie and Cecilia Poletto. to appear 'On standardising syntactic elicitation techniques. In: Lingua