Abstract

This paper provides a synopsis of recent developments in dialect syntactic research. After motivating the importance of investigating dialect syntax both from a theoretical and an empirical point of view, several dialect syntactic projects and methods of data collection are presented. Here, special emphasis is given to the project Syntax of Hessian Dialects (SyHD, www.syhd.info, cf. Fleischer, Lenz & Weiß 2017), funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) between 2010 and 2016. It will be argued for a multidimensional method combining indirect (questionnaires) and direct elicitation techniques (interviews). A second major goal of the present overview consists in showing the high potential of usage of dialect syntactic corpora, both when applying an inductive and a deductive approach. In this context, different possibilities of (i) obtaining new hypotheses on the basis of correlations discovered within the linguistic material on hand as well as (ii) verifying observed correlations and postulated research hypotheses are exemplified by the empirical domains of partitive/quantitative pronouns versus „inflected“ numerals (schwa) in the case of nominal ellipsis, five characteristics of the clausal left periphery, and, finally, some common assumptions about long wh-extraction in German e.g. with respect to subject-object and North-South asymmetries.