Non-standard varieties and areal typology: focus on Europe

Adriano Murelli 

Abstract:

In my talk I will focus on how non-standard varieties of European languages differ from their standard counterparts: the former display traits that are often disregarded in areal-typological research (Murelli/Kortmann 2011). Areview of some morphosyntactic features reveals four general tendencies (Murelli 2025):

1. Different features: non-standard varieties may show morphosyntactic features not found in the roofing standard variety.

2. Greater structural variation: non-standard varieties may display more structures to encode one morphosyntactic feature than standard varieties.

3. Different distribution of features: non-standard varieties may exhibit a different distribution of morphosyntactic structures/features that also occur in the roofing standard variety.

4. Conservativeness vs. innovation: non-standard varieties may be regarded sometimes as being more conservative than standard ones and sometimes as behaving more innovatively.

I will provide evidence for these four tendencies and discuss how including data from non-standard varieties may help make typological descriptions of the European linguistic area more comprehensive and, as invoked by Seiler (2019), more “real”.

Zoom-Link

Meeting ID: 580 775 4066

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