oa Weijnen en het interlinguaal syntactisch onderzoek

The Dutch dialectologist Weijnen was a central figure in the instigation and development of the Atlas Linguarum Europae (ALE). This paper discusses the role of comparative dialect syntax in Weijnen’s work and the ALE and compares this with modern comparative dialect syntax research. One main conclusion is that collecting comparative dialect syntax data on a large scale requires a theoretical perspective to guide and restrict the descriptive questions to be asked. A second main conclusion is that modern technological developments can make large comparative dialect syntactic data sets accessible to the research community. Consequently, it becomes possible to test hypothesized correlations quantitatively. A precondition for such an enhancement of the empirical basis of comparative syntactic research is of course extensive and intensive systematic data collection in as many language areas as possible. Most of this work still has to begin.