Introduction: Towards a comparative historical dialectology

Abstract

In this article, we highlight the challenges facing research in the field of comparative historical dialectology, with a focus on morphological and syntactic phenomena. We define the term “historical comparative dialectology” and use four different studies from different varieties to illustrate how the aims of historical comparative dialectology can be approached. The studies consider different varieties and language stages (different dialects of Old and Modern Catalan, the dialectal continuum of Yucatec Maya, historical dialects of High German, different Occitan dialects) and discuss various phenomena from a historical comparative perspective: differential object marking, numeral classifiers, number distinctions of nouns, and inflectional patterns.