SynAPse: The Syntactic Atlas of European Portuguese

This project is aimed at investigating the spatial dimension of syntactic variation in European Portuguese and at building a digital resource adequate to the requirements of the research on this topic.

The Syntactic Atlas of European Portuguese is a tool to visualize and analyze the distribution of syntactic phenomena across the Portuguese territory, based upon a parsed corpus of dialect speech (the CORDIAL-SIN corpus). This online resource will enable the automatic search and map-plotting of syntactic constructions occurring in the dialect corpus, by combining a search engine for parsed corpora and a webGIS application. The capacity to dynamically and automatically map the combined results of several user-defined searches will make it possible to inspect the spatial correlations among syntactic features and to identify geographical areas of syntactic convergence.

The data unveiled by SynAPse will be analyzed both from a linguistic and a geographic perspective, by interrelating the methodological and theoretical approaches of (micro)comparative syntax and spatial statistics.

Funding: FCT – Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (PTDC/LLT-LIN/32086/2017)

Project start: October 2018