COMBINING GEOLINGUISTIC SOURCES IN DIALECT SYNTAX: THREE CASE-STUDIES THROUGH ALPI AND CORDIAL-SIN

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 a vailable 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 eluci date 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 Linguistico de la Peninsula Iberica (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 pos sessives; 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.