Exploring the role of extra-linguistic factors in defining dialectal variation patterns through cluster comparison

This paper contributes to two open issues in the dialectometric literature, i.e. i) whether and how patterns of linguistic variation are influenced by extra-linguistc features such as the geomorphology of the area, or cultural, administrative and political boundaries, and ii) whether and how the influence of extra-linguistic factors remains stable across linguistically-grounded partitions of data. To investigate these issues, a case study focusing on lexical variation has been carried out on a regional lexical atlas of Tuscan dialects. A variety of extra-linguistic features was taken into account, whose impact and role has been evaluated with respect to both the whole dialectal dataset and across different semantic fields.