SyMiLa and the Atlas linguistique de la France: A tool for the study of Gallo-Romance syntax

Abstract

This paper presents different ways in which the Gallo-Romance data of the Atlas linguistique de la France (ALF) can contribute to syntactic description, typology and analysis. After briefly presenting the SyMiLa project, which aims at making such data accessible, it presents four case-studies. The first one focuses on wh-questions, which provide a horizontal perspective over the whole Gallo-Romance varieties. The complete data set shows how the dominant wh-structures distribute over the Gallo-Romance domain, and how the rarer ones argue for an articulated CP where que ‘that’ stands in Fin, and for a compositional nature of est-ce que. The next section turns to a vertical perspective on the data: it focuses on a very local phenomenon, complementizer doubling, and shows how the ALF reveals an optional but consistent behavior, which adds evidence to a head-movement analysis and suggests that complementizer doubling and recomplementation correspond to two different configurations. The last section deals with isolated data, that could not per se lead to any clear syntactic claim. Anecdotal and unsystematic as they may seem in the atlas, these data signal structures that, as further research shows, can enrich and/or challenge previous generalizations on interrogative clause typing and Negative Concord, respectively. In the latter case, they call for typologies and analyses of Negative Concord that include both optional concord and partial concord.