Rit (Vísindafélag Íslendinga) - 01.06.1970, Page 167
It has been pointed out by generativists that dialect dif-
ferences are very often represented by a relatively small num-
ber of additions or reorderings of phonological and so-called
low-level phonetic rules in the surface structure of a language.7
One should, however, not imagine that the traditional con-
cept of dialect as distinguished from language could be
defined through this simple statement. Any dialectologist
knows that even closely related dialects may diífer in lexicon
and in syntactical surface structure, e.g., word order or agree-
ment. Saltarelli (1966:53,57-58) even asserts that they may
differ in their syntactical deep structures, but I am not con-
vinced by his isolated Italian example.
Very generally one could presume that there are at least
two types of dialectal variation. One type is found, for in-
stance, in the American and Icelandic colonization languages
and also in the regionalvariationofModernStandardSwedish.
It involves mainly additions, deletions, and reorderings of
some rules in the phonological and phonetic surface, plus a
very restricted number of lexical features and syntactical rules.
The other type is characteristic of, for instance, Swedish and
Lappish with regard to their old and in part mutually un-
intelligible dialects. In this case the lexical differences are
much more numerous, and the syntax and the morphopho-
nemics represent clearly different structures. In Swedish one
may, for instance, find the whole scale from the old-fashioned
dialect in Álvdalen with three genders and four cases, i.e.,
the archaic Germanic type which is found in High German
and Icelandic, to modern urban dialects with two genders
and two (in pronouns three) cases, i.e., with the exception
of the retention of the neuter gender, the same type as in
English. In Lappish one can point to the complicated and
partly phonemic system of metaphony in the South, which
contrasts with a very simple counterpart in the North, or to
’Chomsky-Halle 1968:49, m, 342 passim; O’Neil 1968:630-632. It belongs
to the terminological inconsistencies of generative grammar that the low level
is situated in the surface and generative trees grow downwards.