The volume is altogether a significant contribution to generative research and at the same time a valuable linguistic source of the German variety of Bavarian.
- Philipp Rauth, Saarland University, in Journal of Comparative German Linguistics 20(20): 187-197,
This is an excellent collection of papers that are of relevance not only for those interested in dialect syntax in general and in the features of Bavarian in particular, but also for all scholars tackling issues of parametric variation within generative grammar.
- Roland Hinterhölzl, Università Ca’Foscari Venezia, in Zeitschrift für Rezensionen zur germanistischen Sprachwissenschaft, 2017,
To conclude, <i>Bavarian Syntax</i> paints a nearly complete picture of the syntactic phenomena which distinguish Bavarian from the rest of the German-speaking area and beyond. On the one hand, it includes papers on well-known phenomena, revisited in the light of recent judgments or corpus studies, analogies with Romance or other Germanic languages, or data from Bavarian enclaves in North America. On the other hand, there are studies on less researched non-clausal phenomena<br />confirming syntactic universals which are not to be found in, e.g., Standard German. The crucial properties of the phenomena are consistently described in an exhaustive way so that readers who are not native speakers of Bavarian or German can easily access the phenomena in order to draw conclusions or make comparisons with respect to their own subject of research.<br />As for the theoretical approaches, most of the authors use the means of generative syntax in order to analyze the underlying structures of their phenomenon. Thus, the subtitle of the volume Contributions to the theory of syntax would better be specified as ‘generative’, because ‘theoretical syntax’ should not be used synonymously with ‘generative syntax’. There are other ‘theoretical syntaxes’ as well which are not taken into consideration. Apart from that, each author implements recent theoretical<br />developments of both generative syntax and elicitation of dialectal data. The volume is altogether a significant contribution to generative research and at the same time a valuable linguistic source of the German variety of Bavarian.
- Philipp Rauth, Saarland University, in Journal of Comparitive German Linguistics, DOI 10.1007/s10828-017-9087-z,