COMPARING AGGREGATE SYNTAXES

Recently, large and representative databases have become available which record how languages and dialects differ syntactically, i.e. with respect to the way in which words and phrases combine. Barbiers, Cornips and van der Kleij (2002) and Longobardi are examples of
such data collections, and several more are in construction, and should be available presently. This availability of
large amounts of digitized, controlled syntactic data
enables several new questions to be addressed, including how syntactic features are geographically distributed (dialectology and geolinguistics, see Spruit, 2005), to what degree syntactic features associate with one another (typology), and the degree to which syntactic features follow phonological and lexical features in their geographic or linguistic (typological) patterning.
Perhaps most intriguingly both Guardino & Longobardi (2005) and Dunn et al. (2005) postulate that syntactic features are more resistant to change than other linguistic
properties, so that careful examination of shared
syntactic features and especially shared syntactic innovation should be not only a welcome addition to the techniques
of historical reconstruction in linguistics, which rely
primarily on phonetic and morphological evidence, but potentially an improvement.
None of these investigations is conceivable without extensive computational support. Not only is the data digitized, but the analytical procedures, the statistical analysis of the results and their visualization all require significant processing time.
The purpose of this special session will be to present
representative studies exploring the various ways in which
these syntactic databases are being exploited, including ways which might engage other students of the history of human culture.
There will be three papers, one each by the groups at Nijmegen, Trieste and Groningen-Amsterdam. Michael Dunn of Nijmegen will present further aspects of the
Nijmegen group’s work, featured earlier this year in Science,
aimed at using syntactic comparison to reconstruction language history in New Guinea, Giuseppe Longobardi will present new aspects of his work (with Gianollo and Guaridano) exploring especially the value of abstract syntactic features in historical reconstruction, and Marco Spruit and John Nerbonne will present their work (with Heeringa) comparing syntactic distances on the one hand with lexical and phonetic differences on the other.
References
Barbiers, S., L. Cornips & S. van der Kleij (eds). (2002) Syntactic Microvariation. Electronic publication of Meertens Institute and NIWI. URL: http://www.meertens.knaw.nl/books/synmic
Dunn A.M., Terrill A., Reesink G., Foley R. & Levinson
S.C. (2005) Structural Phylogenetics and the
Reconstruction of Ancient Language History. Science,
(309), 2072-2075.
Gianollo, C., C.Guardino, & G.Longobardi (2004, in press) Historical Implications of a Formal Theory of Syntactic Variation. In S.Anderson & D.Jonas (eds.) Proc. of DIGS VIII.
Guardino, C. (2005) Parametric Comparison and
Language Taxonomy. In M.Batallori, M.L.Hernanz,
C.Picallo, and F.Roca (eds.) Grammaticalization and Parametric Variation. Oxford: OUP. pp.149-174.
Spruit, M. (2005) Classifying Dutch dialects using a syntactic measure: The perceptual Daan and Blok
dialect map revisited. In J. Doetjes & J. van de
Weijer (eds.) Linguistics in the Netherlands. Benjamins,
Amsterdam. 179-190.