English Dialect Syntax from a Typological Perspective: The Freiburg Project

Bernd Kortmann

Englisches Seminar der Universität Freiburg
Abstract:
The aim of this paper is to give an outline of the theoretical foundations, methodology, and database of a research project that started in 1997 and is in full bloom now due to a substantial grant by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (2000 through 2002).The basic idea is to show how the study of dialect syntax can profit in many ways from work done in functional (or: Greenbergian) typology, but that the direction of influence (and inspiration) need by no means be a one-way street. The focus will be on interesting dialect features in the British Isles in the domains of pronouns, relativization, and negation. These domains of dialectal variation are among those on which Ph.D. theses in Freiburg have recently been completed or are currently being written.
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Syntactic Atlas of the Dutch Dialects (SAND)