Atlante Sintattico d’Italia (ASIt)
The research group has created and manages the ASIt database, an online resource freely available at the following website http://asit.maldura.unipd.it/. It is a collection of translations into local dialects from a questionnaire administered in standard Italian, which have been tagged on the basis of morphosyntactic features and searchable through tags in one or more dialects. The database contains mainly Italo-Romance varieties but also so called “alloglot” varieties (like Gallo-Romance; German; Slavonic) spoken in linguistic islands and often recognized as minority languages. The database contains 409 speakers representative of 289 inquiry points for a total of 77.210 tagged items, i.e. sentences. The main focus of the database and of the research group perfectly integrates with the other research groups of the network and is centered on microvariation in syntax and morphosyntax of Italo-Romance. It also focuses on linguistic islands and the phenomena connected to language contact and language historical development which should present the same pattern of variation as dialectal areas. The experience acquired since the beginning of the ASIS/ASIt projects (more than 20 years ago) starting from field work and more generally data collection, storage in various forms, tagging and analysis of data, can be of value for the other research groups, even though they work on different languages and have to deal with situations that are sociolinguistically very different from those found in the Italian area. Since the database is expandable, the unit can provide valuable know-how on the enrichment of already collected data.
The empirical field we investigate is approached with the aim of understanding how microvariation works. Starting from the common generative framework which is shared by some of the research groups, our objective is to understand how individual linguistic competence can be modeled in a situation of micro-contact with other linguistic varieties, like the standard, which can be very similar, but also very different (as in the case of German linguistic islands) from each other and which have to be dealt with in both directions (language influencing dialect but also vice versa). The idea of using the geographical distribution to understand which type of analysis can be used to tackle various phenomena can be implemented nowadays with different methods, due to the existence of computational technologies that can help us map the distribution of various phenomena automatically. The research group also offers the expertise of the computer and information scientists who have designed the database.