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Germanic Heritage Languages in North America: Acquisition, attrition and change
Edited by Janne Bondi Johannessen † and Joseph C. Salmons
[Studies in Language Variation 18] 2015
► pp. 135–160

Functional Convergence and Extension in Contact

Syntactic and Semantic Attributes of the Progressive Aspect in Pennsylvania Dutch

| University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire
ORCID logo | Penn State University
This paper investigates the extension of the progressive aspect in contemporary Pennsylvania Dutch. The scope of convergence in contact varieties is a debated subject in theoretical linguistics; the most recent and promising research finds that convergence in contact is not a simple one-to-one mapping, nor an opportunity for any structural anomaly to present. Previous studies concluded that Pennsylvania Dutch had matched and gone beyond English semantic constraints for the progressive aspect. The extent of the progressive in Pennsylvania Dutch has not been systematically documented. To account for these findings, we propose, as most recently suggested by Putnam and Sánchez (2013), an analysis of feature reconfiguration, with the result of progressive aspect appearing with different aspectual classes of verbs (most notably, with certain types of statives).
Keywords: aspect, convergence, feature reconfiguration, hyperextension, Pennsylvania Dutch, semantics, syntax
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at [email protected].

Published online: 20 August 2015
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/silv.18.06bro
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