The aim of this contribution is to present the long history of linguistic research on Cimbrian, an alloglotte variety of Germanic origin, spoken historically in the mountains of the present provinces ...of Verona and Vicenza and in southern Trentino, and still used in the municipality of Lusèrn/Luserna. Moreover, the main linguistic features of Cimbrian, in particular the variety of Lusèrn/Luserna, will be presented. Finally, I will discuss some initiatives for the preservation and promotion of the Cimbrian language and culture.
This study aims to account for the German expression
(literally ‘of ways’) when used outside of the sentence structure. Drawing on corpus data for written and spoken German, we show that there are ...two types of syntactically non-integrated
: (i) illustrating/exemplifying
and, (ii) opposing
. By combining both a formal and a functional perspective, we claim that these two types can be analyzed as modal expressions. In fact, from a formal point of view based on Werner Abraham’s classification in lexical and grammatical forms of modality, both illustrating/exemplifying and opposing
encode a quotative/evidential meaning, whereas only the second type expresses an epistemic modal value. Nevertheless,
does not belong to the prototypical forms of modality described by Abraham as it does not occupy a structural position within the sentence and therefore does not fall into any of the classes proposed by Abraham. For this reason, we also need to integrate the formal perspective with a functional one by defining modality not only structurally but also semantically. In doing so, we account for the modality of
in that we assume the existence of a third strategy of modalization that is specific to syntactically non-integrated expressions and operates at the discourse level.
Lexical expletives can be divided into two main classes: (i) CP expletives required by the V2 constraint and, hence, by the necessity to lexicalize the position on the left of the inflected verb and ...(ii) TP expletives connected with the negative value of the pro-drop parameter and, therefore, with the necessity to lexicalize the ’structural‘ subject position, specifically, Spec, TP. The latter can, in turn, be divided into two subclasses: impersonal subjects and positional expletives, which occur with postverbal/low subjects and extraposed subject clauses. While CP expletives only appear in Germanic varieties that maintain V2, the subclassification of TP expletives yields interesting results when comparing Cimbrian and the Venetan varieties in Nord-East Italy, where the gradual disappearance of the positional expletive in free inversion structures and the residual maintenance of impersonal subjects from North to South along the Adige River confirms the distinction between two classes of subject expletives; furthermore, the resilience of impersonal subjects and their distribution in the northwestern part of the area under consideration sheds light on the role of language contact which is confirmed along the same axis—but crucially in the opposite direction—by the increasing employment of cleft constructions in WH-clauses replacing enclisis (i.e.,: pronominal subject inversion with the finite verb).
Die Buchreihe Linguistische Arbeiten (LA) trägt wesentlich zur aktuellen linguistischen Theoriebildung im Bereich der allgemeinen und einzelsprachlichen Linguistik bei. Veröffentlicht werden ...hochwertige Arbeiten, die aktuelle Fragestellungen bearbeiten und die Entwicklung der Sprachwissenschaft, synchron oder diachron, empirisch oder theoretisch orientiert, vorantreiben.
The contributions of this book deal with the issue of language variation. They all share the assumption that within the language faculty the variation space is hierarchically constrained and that ...minimal changes in the set of property values defining each language give rise to diverse outputs within the same system. Nevertheless, the triggers for language variation can be different and located at various levels of the language faculty. The novelty of the volume lies in exploring different loci of language variation by including wide-ranging empirical perspectives that cover different levels of analysis (syntax, phonology and prosody) and deal with different kinds of data, mostly from Romance and Germanic languages, from dialects, idiolects, language acquisition, language attrition and creolization, analyzed from both diachronic and synchronic perspectives. The volume is divided in three parts. The first part is dedicated to synchronic variation in phonology and syntax; the second part deals with diachronic variation and language change, and the third part investigates the role of contact, attrition and acquisition in giving rise to language change and language variation in bilingual settings. This volume is a useful tool for linguistics of diverse theoretical persuasions working on theoretical and comparative linguistics and to anyone interested in language variation, language change, dialectology, language acquisition and typology.
Feature Borrowing in Language Contact Tomaselli, Alessandra; Bidese, Ermenegildo; Padovan, Andrea
Languages,
12/2022, Volume:
7, Issue:
4
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
In this paper, we consider mood selection in embedded clauses by focusing on a German-based minority language, Cimbrian, which is spoken in a northern Italian enclave. Mood selection in Cimbrian ...relies on the presence of two different complementizers, az and ke (the latter being borrowed from Romance varieties), each of which selectively require a specific mood. Az selects the mood subjunctive in modal sentences introduced by non-factive verbs, whereas ke co-occurs with the indicative in purely declarative clauses introduced by factive and semi-factive verbs. However, this binary distribution is challenged in the two following contexts, and it is precisely at this point that feature borrowing comes into play: (i) with the verb gloam ‘to believe/to think’, the expected binary pattern appears (irrealis az + subjunctive and the realis ke + indicative), but, crucially, a third construction emerges, namely ke + subj.; (ii) surprisingly, az + subj. displays some ‘gaps’ in its paradigm, specifically in the first person, which appeared in the data we collected via translation tasks from Italian into Cimbrian. Both phenomena shed light on how language contact works, not in terms of structural borrowing but rather in terms of the transfer of the specific features of a given lexical item.
In our paper, we deal with the Germanic–Romance language contact, focusing on Cimbrian, a Germanic minority language spoken in Northern Italy. Specifically, we focus on the violation of the ...well-known that-trace filter, as it appears to be an interesting case of the superficial convergence that we ascribe to the status of T, which is either too rich (model language) or too weak (replica language) to represent a viable landing site for subject extraction.
PDF
