Relevancia del análisis lingüístico en el tratamiento cuantitativo de la variación dialectal

Resumen

In previous studies we have argued in favour of the need for a phonological analysis of dialectal data prior to quantitatively determining linguistic distance. Our idea, based on generative linguistics, has to do with the fact that phonetic coincidences may frequently hide relevant phonological divergences. Thus, we consider that quantitative analyses carried out solely from phonetic data cannot reflect existing differences or similarities among dialectal varieties adequately. So far, our reasoning has always been backed by small-scale laboratory tests performed on small sets of data. In the present study, however, our reasoning in favour of linguistic analysis is corroborated by a tested and global treatment of data from the Contemporary Catalan Oral Dialect Corpus. To this end we have carried out two quantitative studies: one on the basis of phonetic data, and another one using a phonological analysis of the data.