SyHD & Südtirol - The SyHD research method and its application to the syntax of German in South Tyrol

La conferenza fa parte del ciclo delle Conversazioni linguistiche, una serie di incontri che offrono a linguiste/i italiane/i e internazionali un'occasione per confrontarsi sui rispettivi studi e per tenersi aggiornate/i sui nuovi sviluppi della ricerca.

• Thomas Strobel

Institut für Linguistik - Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main

Abstract

The exploration and multivariate data collection method adapted or developed within the DFG funded project SyHD (Syntax of Hessian Dialects, 2010–2016 at the universities of Frankfurt, Marburg and Vienna, https://syhd.regionalsprache.de), building upon previous projects such as the SAND (Syntactic Atlas of the Dutch Dialects) and the SADS (Syntactic Atlas of Swiss German Dialects), today serves as a model for collecting, evaluating and analyzing dialect syntactic data. This does not only hold for the chosen selection criteria regarding the locations of data collection and the included informants as well as for the applied combination of indirect and direct survey techniques (i.e. questionnaires plus inter-views). Essentially, it also concerns the varied typology of the (more or less closed or open) elicitation tasks used (acceptability/multiple choice questions, translation tasks, sentence completion tasks, “puzzle” exercises, description of images and image sequences, language production tests with auditory or audiovisual stimuli etc.) and the broad range of the investigated empirical domains and phenomena (from (pro)nominal syntax, verbal syntax and agreement phenomena to word order/serialization, sentence linking, and others).

During the talk, we want to explore the possibilities and limits of transferring the SyHD approach to the syntax of German in South Tyrol (Südtirol/Alto Adige). For this purpose, we are going to discuss the specific socio and spatiolinguistic properties of Hesse versus South Tyrol, for example with respect to the issue of (intergenerational) dialect loyalty und individual repertoires (especially in the multilingual and multidialectal context of South Tyrol), for example with respect to:

• the question of language/dialect contact and change (e.g. standard-induced dialect convergence in contrast to dialect divergence due to administrative borders),
• the horizontal/areal aspect of a more fine-grained classification of dialect subareas (core and transitional zones), so far mostly on a phonological and/or lexical basis,
• the dynamics of the vertical continuum of the varieties of German from local dialects via regiolectal varieties (consisting, for a long time, of several regional dialects instead of one common overarching regiolect, as opposed to the more recent development and spread of such a supraregional variety as a result of the “radiation power” of Bolzano) through to the (spoken) standard language, which leads to the fundamental decision about the level to be investigated along the dialect-standard axis (dialect or regional syntax, i.e. only substandard varieties, or the entire spectrum of varieties, including the (oral) standard).

Furthermore, a first compilation of typical morphosyntactic phenomena in South Tyrolean German will be brought together, not least with the aim to test the presented elicitation methods and tasks on them.