Combining geolinguistic sources in dialect syntax

Abstract

Although geolinguistic projects do not usually provide adequate (if any) coverage of syntactic variation, current studies of dialect syntax still may benefit from data that were made available in traditional linguistic atlases. Concomitantly, dialect corpora, as a different kind of linguistic resource for the study of nonstandard syntax, often grant access to spontaneous oral data that allow the study of phenomena that are hard to elucidate through traditional questionnaires. In this paper we present and discuss three morphosyntactic phenomena in European Portuguese varieties, as they appear through both kinds of sources - more specifically, the Atlas Lingüístico de la Península Ibérica (ALPI), a traditional linguistic atlas, and CORDIAL-SIN, a dialect corpus. Through both sources, we will investigate the geolinguistic syntactic variation concerning: (i) the distribution of gerund forms; (ii) the presence of articles before prenominal possessives; and (iii) the distribution of verbal forms ending in -ra. The contrast and complementarity of both kinds of sources, namely, their advantages and inconveniences, invite us to discuss new methods that integrate complementary methods in collecting data for dialect syntax. © Universitat de Barcelona.