Search results for " Cimbrian"
showing 3 items of 3 documents
Contact-induced phenomena in the Alps
2019
The main question underlying this chapter is to what extent language contact can affect syntactic structure. To tackle this issue we examine two relevant phenomena found in two minority languages spoken in the region Trentino-Alto Adige/South Tyrol: clitic climbing in Dolomitic Ladin and the use of the Romance complementizer ke in Cimbrian. Both phenomena are usually considered as the result of a contact-induced change influenced by the neighbouring Italo-Romance varieties. However, it is shown that the rising of clitic climbing is a language-internal process which is only accelerated by the contact with Italian. Similarly, the lexical borrowing of the complementizer ke in Cimbrian does not…
Das zweifache Komplementierersystem im Zimbrischen: Romanische Entlehnung und Eigenentwicklung
2018
Cimbrian is a German(ic) minority language which has long been in contact with Romance varieties in the Northeast of Italy and represents an ideal object of analysis for investigating some specific issues in language contact, such as the borrowing of functional words. In this article, we first provide a detailed description of the Cimbrian subordination system putting forward an analysis of both the Romance loanword ke and the native complementizer az; secondly, we try to generalize the concept of ‘functional loanword’ comparing Cimbrian with typologically different languages. In a nutshell, we propose a common grammaticalization path, by which functional words borrowed from a model languag…
Il ruolo del contatto tra varietà tedesche e romanze nella costruzione «verbo più locativo»
2016
In this article we examine some effects of language contact in the multilingual province of Trento, where Romance and Germanic varieties have been in contact for centuries. We focus on the syntax of phrasal verbs (e. g. ‘go out’, ‘get away’) in Trentin, a Romance dialect group, in Fassan, a Rhaeto-romance variety, and in Cimbrian, a German(ic) minority language. In particular, we deal with two word order phenomena which might be attributed to contact with the more prestigious or widespread varieties spoken in the area: (i) in some Fassan phrasal verbs we find the order «Verb – XP – Locative element», which resembles the German order; (ii) in Cimbrian various syntactic positions are possible…