On standardising syntactic elicitation techniques

The aim of this article is to provide a first overview on several syntactic elicitation techniques used by dialectologists and sociolinguists and to evaluate them from a generative perspective. Both oral and written techniques will be taken into account and analyzed according to the sociolinguistic situation. In addition, basic problems like the choice of subject, the language used for the interaction will be addressed and discussed on the basis of two syntactic Atlases, the Dutch SAND and the Italian ASIS.

Keywords: syntactic elicitation, non-standard varieties, dialectology, syntactic variables, standardization