Measuring Syntactic Variation in Dutch Dialects

This research applies dialectometric methods to purely syntactic dialect data. It will be shown that there is geographic cohesion in syntactic variation when viewed in the aggregate. The amount of syntactic variation which can be accounted for by geography will be determined. Dialectometric techniques will be used to develop an additive measure of syntactic differences. Multidimensional scaling will be applied to visualise the geographic distribution of the Dutch dialects with respect to syntactic variation in the aggregate. The Dutch dialect map based on a syntactic measure will be compared with a dialect map based on subjective judgements and a dialect map based on pronunciation differences to put the syntactic measurement results into perspective. An alternative way to measure syntactic distance will be presented and will provide indications for future research to more accurately quantify syntactic variation.