A Digital Library Effort to Support the Building of Grammatical Resources for Italian Dialects

In this paper we present the results of a project, named ASIt, which provides linguists with a crucial test bed for formal hypotheses concerning human language. In particular, ASIt aims to capture crosslinguistic variants of grammatical structures within a sample of about 200 Italian Dialects. Since dialects are rarely recognized as official languages, first of all linguists need a dedicated digital library system providing the tools for the unambiguous identification of each dialect on the basis of geographical, administrative and geo-linguistic parameters. Secondly, the information access component of the digital library system needs to be designed to allow users to search the occurrences of a specific grammatical structure (e.g. a relative clause or a particular word order) rather than a specific word. Thirdly, since ASIt has been specifically geared to the needs of linguists, user-friendly graphical interfaces need to be created to give easy access to and make the building of the language resource easier and distributed. The paper reports on the ways these three main aims have been achieved.