Syntactic doubling and variation
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Aurore Tirard
Abstract
This paper analyses a case of syntactic doubling in Romani: the full doubling of the definite article in NPs including an adjective. This structure (dnda) is similar to the Greek polydefiniteness and displays the same grammatical optionality. A task was designed to trigger its use and submitted to Albanian Romani native speakers. The results show that an evolution in the nominal constituent order has taken place in contrastive contexts, whereby the community is still split into subgroups experiencing different patterns of language change. This doubling (dnda) has been used as a kind of bridge from the canonical word order (dan) to a new one (dna). Social factors show that this process has been favoured by contact with Albanian and/or Greek.
Abstract
This paper analyses a case of syntactic doubling in Romani: the full doubling of the definite article in NPs including an adjective. This structure (dnda) is similar to the Greek polydefiniteness and displays the same grammatical optionality. A task was designed to trigger its use and submitted to Albanian Romani native speakers. The results show that an evolution in the nominal constituent order has taken place in contrastive contexts, whereby the community is still split into subgroups experiencing different patterns of language change. This doubling (dnda) has been used as a kind of bridge from the canonical word order (dan) to a new one (dna). Social factors show that this process has been favoured by contact with Albanian and/or Greek.
Chapters in this book
- Prelim pages i
- Table of contents v
- Introduction vii
-
Plenaries
- Analytic and synthetic 3
- A case for clustering speakers and linguistic variables 23
- Dynamics, variation and the brain 47
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Individual chapters
- Aggregate analysis of lexical variation in Galician 71
- Inter-individual variation among young children growing up in a bidialectal community 85
- The unruly dialect variant [a] 99
- Vowel raising and vowel deletion as sociolinguistic variables in Northern Greek 113
- Between local and standard varieties 125
- Syntactic doubling and variation 141
- Variation in style 157
- A corpus-based study of concessive conjunctions in three L1-varieties of English 173
- Variation in the structure of conjunctions in Luxembourgish German in the 19th century 185
- Geolinguistic documentation of multilingual areas 199
- Variation in Croatian 215
- Index 233
Chapters in this book
- Prelim pages i
- Table of contents v
- Introduction vii
-
Plenaries
- Analytic and synthetic 3
- A case for clustering speakers and linguistic variables 23
- Dynamics, variation and the brain 47
-
Individual chapters
- Aggregate analysis of lexical variation in Galician 71
- Inter-individual variation among young children growing up in a bidialectal community 85
- The unruly dialect variant [a] 99
- Vowel raising and vowel deletion as sociolinguistic variables in Northern Greek 113
- Between local and standard varieties 125
- Syntactic doubling and variation 141
- Variation in style 157
- A corpus-based study of concessive conjunctions in three L1-varieties of English 173
- Variation in the structure of conjunctions in Luxembourgish German in the 19th century 185
- Geolinguistic documentation of multilingual areas 199
- Variation in Croatian 215
- Index 233
