Theoretische taalkunde in het digitale tijdperk. A match made in heaven

Samenvatting

This paper argues that formal-theoretical – in particular generative – and quantitative-statistical approaches to language variation are highly complementary. The latter have sophisticated means of dealing with large and highly variable data sets, while the former introduce hypotheses and analyses that can guide the interpretation of the statistical results. We illustrate this claim on the basis of two case studies of morphosyntactic variation in Dutch dialects.