The ASIS enterprise: a view on the construction of a syntactic atlas for the Northern Italian dialects

In this article we intend to illustrate how the ASIS (Atlante Sintattico dell’Italia Settentrionale “Syntactic Atlas of Northern Italy”) project has been created and developed. We discuss the theoretical, empirical, and practical problems that we encountered working on such an enterprise, and the choices we made in order to solve them. We have created a layered methodology, which has proved useful in gathering more and more detailed data in an interplay between theoretical analysis and field work. As no method is perfect, we will here also outline some of the problematic aspects of our project.