Identifying Dialect Regions from Syntactic Data

The Syntactic Atlas of Dutch Dialects (SAND) is a database of syntactic features observed in the language spoken by people from different dialect regions in The Netherlands and Flanders. We would like to know how specific syntactic features are for the different dialects. For this purpose we try to generate dialect boundaries from the syntactic data only. We show that a plausible binary division of the dialect can successfully be derived but that is more difficult to divide the data in three or more regions. We build on earlier work by Nerbonne, Heeringa en Kleiweg (1999), who performed this task for phonetic data, and on work by Spruit (2008), who also attempted to identify dialect regions from syntactic data