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Italian Dialectology at the Interfaces
Edited by Silvio Cruschina, Adam Ledgeway and Eva-Maria Remberger
[Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today 251] 2019
► pp. 237–255

Contact-induced phenomena in the Alps

| Universiteit Utrecht
| Università di Verona

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 entail that its syntactic properties are also borrowed.

Keywords: language contact, Ladin, Cimbrian, clitic climbing, complementizer
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Clitic climbing in Romance
  • 3.Clitic climbing as a contact phenomenon?
    • 3.1Clitic climbing in the varieties surrounding Dolomitic Ladin
    • 3.2Discussion of the data and analysis
  • 4.Cimbrian
    • 4.1The double complementizer system in Cimbrian: The state of the art
    • 4.2The unexpected pattern ke + subjunctive
  • 5.Conclusions
  • Acknowldgement
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 5 February 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/la.251.11cas
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