Maps and grammars

Project leader: Sjef Barbiers

Medewerkers: Hans Bennis, Gertjan Postma, Marc van Oostendorp, Erik Tjong Kim Sang (postdoc)

Finance: NWO

Short description:

The phonological, morphological and syntactic atlasses that have been published in recent years are to a certain extent traditional dialectological atlasses in that their maps show the geographic distribution of individual linguistic properties. A central hypothesis in theoretical linguistics, however, is that a dialect (or language) is not an accidental collection of individual linguistic properties. Each dialect has a grammar, a cluster of systematically interacting linguistic properties. The goal of this project is to analyze large sets of dialect data quantitatively, to model the resulting clusters theoretically and to put the (partial) grammars thus produced on geographic maps. See also the website http://ifarm.nl/maps/.