Lezing van Prof. Dr. Jürg Fleischer (Deutscher Sprachatlas, universiteit Marburg)

Continental West Germanic dialect syntax: evidence from the (German and Dutch) Wenker surveys

It is quite obvious that linguistic and political boarders need not coincide. Nevertheless, in dialectology, if only for practical reasons we usually collect data with respect to politically defined areas. For that reason data from different projects are often not directly comparable. In my talk I would like to take a closer look at various syntactic phenomena (pro-drop, pronoun serialization, infinitival complementation) by using one data type that is available for the whole Continental West Germanic area, the so-called Wenker surveys (which, for the Netherlands, date from 1934). Although we are dealing with translation tasks, the sheer quantity of the Wenker surveys (more than 50 000 data points, covering the Continental West Germanic area in total) and their exact comparability partially make up for the shortcomings of the methodology.