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Dialect Syntax

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This is an ESF-funded project on dialect syntax. It runs at the Meertens Institute in Amsterdam from September 2005 until September 2010. It aims at achieving two goals.
One is to establish a European network of (dialect)syntacticians that use similar standards with respect to methodology of data collection, data storage and annotation, data retrieval and cartography. The second goal is to use this network to compile an extensive list of so-called doubling phenomena from European languages/dialects and to study them as a coherent object. Since these phenomena primarily occur in non-standard varieties, their existence has gone largely unnoticed in the linguistic literature. The project will therefore greatly enhance the empirical basis of syntactic research. Cross-linguistic comparison of doubling phenomena will enable us to test or formulate new hypotheses about natural language and language variation.
Recent research on Dutch dialects (SAND-project) has revealed a wealth of doubling phenomena that do not appear in Standard Dutch. See for instance the cases in (1) - (7) below.

(1)

Subject pronoun doubling and subject agreement doubling:

Ze	peiz-n	da-n	ze	ziender	rijker	zij-n.
they	think-3PL	that-3PL	they	they	richer	are-3PL

'They think that they are richer.'

(2)

Wh-word doubling:

Wel	denkst	wel	ik	in	de	stad	ontmoet	heb.
who	think-2PL	who	I	in	the	city	met	have

'Who do you think I met in the city?'

(3)

Participial morphology doubling:

Zol	hee	dat	edane	hemmn	ekund.
would	he	that	done-PART	have	could-PART

'Could he have done that?'

(4)

Auxiliary doubling:

K-em	da	gezegd	gehad.
I-have	that	said-PART	had-PART

'I have said that.'

(5)

Verb doubling:

Doe	het	brood	eve	snije!
do	the	bread	particle	cut

'Please, cut the bread.'

(6)

Negative concord:

't	en	danst-ij	niemand	nie.
it	NEG	danses-it	nobody	not

'Nobody is dancing.'

(7)

Indefinite determiner doubling:

Zoo-n	ding	een	ha	ik	ze	leve	nie	gezie.
such-a	thing	one	have	I	his	life	never	seen

'I have never seen such a thing.'

Since most of these phenomena primarily occur in non-standard varieties, their existence, as well as their importance, has gone largely unnoticed in the linguistic literature. Doubling structures are interesting both from a descriptive and a theoretical and raise the following issues:

1. Doubling can give us important clues about the structure of language. In particular, a doubling construction contains an element that seems semantically superfluous. This raises the question of why language would make use of such redundancy. One could perhaps argue that doubling is a meaningful tool, used to facilitate communication or put focus on some constituent within the clause. At this point, it is unclear to what extent these explanations are valid. They at least do not shed instant light on another general issue: the doubling phenomena illustrated above occur far more pervasively in the Dutch dialects than in the standard variety, and the same has been reported for other dialect families. Any theory on variation should be able to deal with such qualitative and quantitative differences. More data are required in order to ascertain whether and where such differences are attested. It is an open question whether some level of unification of doubling phenomena can be established. The general questions raised above easily lead to precise ones, as soon as a particular framework is adopted. Within a generative approach, for instance, doubling phenomena have significant consequences for the way we look at syntactic dependencies. A relevant question is whether doubling involves the spell-out of intermediate copies of a movement chain or reveals the existence of generalized specifier-head configurations. Hence, the proposed research enables us to test central hypotheses about syntactic theories and formulate new ones. Different frameworks may well provide different parts of the puzzle.

2. Research on doubling phenomena is likely to contribute to our understanding of syntactic variation. It helps us to define what is known as micro-variation, i.e. the variation between closely related languages. It has for instance been suggested that doubling structures do not differ underlyingly from their non-doubling counterparts, the only difference being that more is spelled out. If so, doubling is basically a phonological procedure. This reasoning may well extend to other dialectal phenomena. One is word order in Germanic verb clusters, where one could claim that dialects/languages do not differ in the underlying syntactic structure of the cluster, but only in the way they spell out the order of the verbs. In order to formulate hypotheses of this kind we need to know how extensive the doubling phenomenon is and what the boundaries are. Are there any limitations as to what kind of categories doubling can target? If so, how do we explain these limitations? These answers will eventually not only contribute towards the characterization of micro-variation but will in turn have implications on how we look at meso-variation (e.g. OV vs. VO) and macro-variation (e.g. polysynthetic vs. non-polysynthetic).