The Dutch network group

A group of researchers connected to the Dutch dialect syntax project SAND (‘Syntactische Atlas van de Nederlandse Dialecten’) takes part in the NordForsk Network for Scandinavian Dialect Syntax. The SAND project is administered from Meertens Institute in Amsterdam, but scholars from other institutions in The Netherlands and Belgium are also involved in the project. Some of the members of the group are also involved in the new project European Dialect Syntax, supported by the European Science Foundation (see below).

The Dutch NordForsk network group has the following members (affiliations other than Meertens Institute are specified):

•Sjef Barbiers (leader)
•Johan van der Auwera (University of Antwerp)
•Hans Bennis
•Hans den Besten (Universitiy of Amsterdam/HIL)
•Leonie Cornips
•Jeroen van Craenenbroeck (Catholic University of Brussels)
•Magda Devos (University of Gent)
•Margreet van der Ham
•Olaf Koeneman
•Marjo van Koppen (Utrecht University)
•Jan Pieter Kunst
•Marika Lekakou
•Annemie Neuckermans (University of Antwerp)
•Johan Rooryck (University of Leiden)
•Gunther de Vogelaer (University of Gent)
•Henk Wolf (The Frisian Academy)
•Hedde H. Zeijlstra (University of Tübingen)


The members of this group have been cooperating in the project Syntactic Atlas of the Dutch Dialects since January 2000. The main result of this project so far is the beta-version of an on-line Dynamic Syntactic Atlas including all the syntactic data of 267 dialects of Dutch collected during the project, a user friendly search engine and cartographic software to generate maps on demand. Four PhD dissertations are ready: (i) Craenenbroeck, Jeroen van (2004), Ellipsis in Dutch dialects. Leiden University, LOT Dissertations 96; (ii) Zeijlstra, Hedde (2004), Sentential Negation and Negative Concord, University of Amsterdam, LOT Dissertations 101; (iii) Koppen, Marjo van (2005), One probe - two goals. Aspects of Agreement in Dutch Dialects, Leiden University; (iv) De Vogelaer, Gunther (2005), Subjectsmarkering in de Nederlandse en Friese Dialecten. Diss. Ghent University. Two other PhD theses are on their way. In addition, the project has yielded about 45 publications, most of them in international journals and books. Current work involves further development of the Dynamic Atlas and the production of a two volume printed atlas containing a selection of the attested variation and a linguistic commentary on the maps. Volume 1 appeared in June 2005. It includes topics such as complementiser agreement, the reflexive system, subject pronouns, subject doubling and clitisation, relative clauses, wh-doubling, and topicalisation.

The group includes dialectologists, generative linguists, typologists, a sociolinguist, and a technician. Thus, all the expertise that large scale dialect syntax projects require is represented, both from a linguistic and from a methodological and technical perspective. Most of the group members work at the Meertens Instituut, others work at the universities of Leiden, Amsterdam, Ghent and Antwerp. As a result, both the Dutch and the Flemish dialects are covered. The group is cooperating with dialect syntax research groups in Utrecht (DP structure in Dutch dialects), Freiburg (English dialects), Padua (Northern Italian dialects), Zürich (Swiss-German dialects), Konstanz (Alemannic) and with the Scandinavian dialect syntax researchers involved in the NordForsk network. A recent European Young Investigator award (EURYI) from the European Science Foundation (ESF) to Prof. dr. Sjef Barbiers will enhance these collaborative efforts. Through a period of five years prof. Barbiers will lead the project European Dialect Syntax (‘Edisyn’) where one of the main objectives is to strengthen the cooperation between existing and new dialect syntax projects in Europe.