The Scots Syntactic Atlas

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While traditional dialect atlas work has concentrated on phonological and lexical variation, recent years have seen a surge in work on dialect syntax, particularly in Europe. In the context of Scotland, there are a few studies on the morphosyntax of a small number of specific Scots dialects, but there has been no systematic coverage of the type proposed here, and indeed no such project has been conducted on any English dialect region to date. This is not only a substantial gap in the descriptive record, but also a gap in the analytical landscape: previous syntactic atlas projects have shown that the geographically sophisticated microcomparative method is a powerful tool for testing theoretical accounts of syntactic properties that vary across dialects, and since Scots dialects show substantial variation with respect a number of theoretically significant syntactic phenomena (e.g. subject-verb agreement, negation and relativization), it presents the analyst with a major opportunity to reassess many key issues in English syntax and indeed theoretical linguistics more widely.The primary goal of SCOSYA is to begin to fill this gap by providing a systematic and theoretically informed description of the non-standard syntactic properties of contemporary dialects of Scots and representing the results visually in an online atlas. We will gather data from four speakers in 122 locations distributed across Scotland and Northern Ireland; the main source of data will be grammaticality judgements, gathered using the interview method employed successfully in other projects, but this will be supplemented by recordings of conversational discourse between dialect speakers, which will be transcribed and made available through the website. The judgement data will be entered into a database which will form the basis for the online atlas; this will be fully interactive, allowing users to generate their own maps plotting the distribution of individual syntactic phenomena or combinations of phenomena, with various visualisation options. The atlas will have two interfaces, one for non-experts and one for experts; the former will be supplemented by commentary and instructions to ensure that it is user-friendly for the general public, while the latter will link to transcripts and full sound files for research purposes. In addition to the atlas data, we will also gather judgement data on locale-specific phenomena of interest that have remained understudied until now, thus extending the description of the grammar of Scots dialects substantially.We will then use this substantial descriptive resource to pursue a number of analytical and theoretical goals. The key analytical questions are: (i) to what extent do dialectally variable syntactic phenomena co-occur (in a manner not directly attributable to geographic/sociohistoric factors)? (ii) to what extent does the range of variation with syntactic phenomena realise full paradigms, and if not, are there significant gaps in the paradigms, and what would account for those gaps? (iii) what differences are there between the dialects of older and younger speakers, and do any differences between dialects co-occur with others across dialect regions? The answers to these analytical questions will give us new insight into the nature of the syntactic phenomena. The central theoretical goal of the project is to use the empirical picture provided by the atlas to reassess just which aspects of syntactic variation are to be accounted for by parameters, and which are the result of rules that negotiate how syntactic representations are realized morphophonologically (by fundamentally post-syntactic rules); that is, how much syntactic variation is post-syntactic, and what kind of theory of syntax does this require?