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Complementizer agreement in eastern Wisconsin: (Central) Franconian features in an American heritage language community
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Joshua Bousquette
Published/Copyright:
October 25, 2014
Abstract
The present study shows that Wisconsin Heritage German licenses complementizer agreement for second person singular, with inflectional affixes developed through the reanalysis of phonetically-derived hiatus effects. Most frequently attested in speakers with direct ancestry to Franconian-speaking regions, this phenomenon is restricted to second person singular, consistent with the input varieties at time of immigration. Analyzed diachronically, complementizer agreement is shown to progress through a linguistic cycle involving the reanalysis and subsequent compensatory reinforcement of subject pronouns, with Wisconsin Heritage German exhibiting the earliest stage of this cycle.
Keywords: complementizer agreement; feature economy; German; grammaticalization; heritage language; linguistic cycle; Wisconsin
Published Online: 2014-10-25
Published in Print: 2014-11-1
©2014 by Walter de Gruyter Berlin/Munich/Boston
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Keywords for this article
complementizer agreement;
feature economy;
German;
grammaticalization;
heritage language;
linguistic cycle;
Wisconsin
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- The vulnerability of the C-layer: introductory notes on German complementizers in contact
- Complementizers in the German-language Sprachinsel of Deutschpilsen/Nagybörzsöny (Hungary)
- Language contact and variation patterns in Walser German subordination
- The syntax of subordination in Cimbrian and the rationale behind language contact
- On asymmetric pro-drop in Mòcheno. Pinning down the role of contact in the maintenance of a root-embedded asymmetry
- From C-oriented cliticization to verbal agreement in Kansas Bukovina Bohemian
- Complementizer agreement in eastern Wisconsin: (Central) Franconian features in an American heritage language community
- On the variability of Texas German wo as a complementizer
- How interrogative pronouns can become relative pronouns: the case of was in Misionero German
- Complex complementizers and the structural relation with weak T. New (morpho)syntactic data from a Pomeranian language island in Brazil
- Annual Index Volume 67 (2014)
