Clues from Dialect Syntax: Complementizer Agreement

Abstract

It is common opinion among linguists, that languages and dialects cannot be distinguished in a principled way. Languages differ from each other with respect to certain syntactic phenomena, but so do dialects. Especially recent theoretical developments have provided the tools needed to describe these differences in an explanatory way. However, these tools will not serve to distinguish, say, Dutch dialects from the Dutch language. To be sure, we cannot exclude the possibility that one dialect of Dutch called Standard Dutch can be distinguished from all other dialects of Dutch by certain distinct linguistic criteria. However, this would be a matter of accidental taxonomy rather than one of methodological principle. More interesting is the possibility that a phenomenon present only in certain dialects of Dutch reveals properties shared by all dialects of Dutch, but not by any dialect of, say, English. Obviously, this calls for generalizations at an appropriate level of abstraction.

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