Dialect Syntax Workshop

Impossible and Unrealized Syntactic Structures
Sjef Barbiers, Meertens Instituut (Amsterdam) and Utrecht University

This talk is based on the results emerging from two large-scale micro-comparative syntax research projects: the Syntactic Atlas of the Dutch Dialects (SAND; more than 100 syntactic variables in 267 dialects of Dutch) and the European Dialect Syntax project (Edisyn). These results strongly suggest that judging a syntactic structure as ungrammatical can mean one of three things:
(i) The structure is impossible in all languages because it violates a universal principle;
(ii) The structure is impossible in some language as a result of the interaction between universal principles and language specific properties;
(iii) The structure is possible but happens to be unrealized.

Cases (ii) and (iii) are two distinct sources of language variation. To illustrate these different types of "ungrammaticality" I present three case studies:
(i) Impossible and unrealized words (reflexives);
(ii) Impossible and unrealized word orders (word order variation in DP’s and verb clusters);
(iii) Impossible and unrealized chains (Wh-chains and subject pronoun chains).


Expressive capability trumps syntax: A case study in colloquial English pronominals.
John Beavers, Georgetown University

In many colloquial dialects of English there is an expression of the form Possessive Pronoun+"ass" (e.g. "her ass", "his ass", which we collectively refer to as "your ass") which may act as an anaphor ("Johni bought his assi a car") or a pronoun ("Hei said that his assj left yesterday"), suggesting that it is not subject to any canonical binding principles (cf. Chomsky 1981). In this talk we demonstrate that this expression is indeed pronominal (i.e. it does not pattern like an R-expression according to various criteria), but that its lack of syntactic distributional constraints suggest that it is a type of "universal pronoun". We explore this idea in particular in terms of Kiparsky's (2002) typology of pronominal types. Kiparsky classifies pronominal expressions cross-linguistically in terms of two criteria: inherent binding domains (defined in terms of increasingly more restricted syntactic environments) and obviation (whether a pronominal must have disjoint reference with its co-argument). Systems of pronominal expressions in a given language are also subject to blocking, wherein pronominals with more restricted distributions block the use of pronominals with more general distributions in the more restricted environments.

We show that "your ass" satisfies the hitherto unattested slot of "universal pronoun" in this typology, i.e. a pronoun that has the most general possible binding domain and is non-obviative. However, in the English pronominal system we would expect "your ass" to be blocked in the local binding domains of reflexives. We argue that the lack of blocking can be explained in terms of the social and evaluative meaning of "your ass". Specifically, we show that "your ass" has an element of meaning not found in other English pronominals, in that it marks certain social contexts and also conveys the speaker's attitude about power relations between the participants in the event or situation under discussion. This additional information prevents blocking by reflexives, which do not convey this additional meaning.

In sum, "your ass" fills in an unattested gap in Kiparsky's typology, provided additional factors of meaning are taken into account. This suggests more generally that lexical semantics and expressive content are relevant for binding theories in ways not previously thought, since it appears that syntactic constraints can be obviated or vacated to satisfy certain expressive needs.


Technical aspects of dialect syntax research: The Syntactic Atlas of Dutch Dialects (SAND)
Jan Pieter Kunst, Meertens Instituut (Amsterdam)

In this talk, I will discuss how we went from the raw data (sound files and transcripts of interviews) collected for the SAND project to a useable web application, describing some of the problems we encountered along the way and how we resolved them. I will also provide an overview of our future project, namely how we plan to combine the SAND data with other dialect corpora in a larger framework: the European Dialect Syntax project (Edisyn).