Volume 63, Issue 02 -

This work presents experimental results on the position of the subject in wh- questions of the Spanish variety of Catalonia and of Catalan. Gradient acceptability judgments have been collected with a sample of native speakers, which were fairly balanced bilinguals. It is attempted to account for the striking similarity between the judgment patterns of the Spanish variety of Catalonia and Catalan, and to model at the same time the nuanced, but systematic differences. The similarities are explained by assuming the same set of rules or constraints, regarding the left-peripheral order of a shift topic and a focal element, and regarding the positional restrictions of subjects co-occurring with an argumental wh -element. However, the violation of a rule provokes slightly different degrees of markedness in Spanish and Catalan. This gradient phenomenon is captured by the idea that the violation of a rule comes with a specific cost, which can differ between languages, and that the degree of acceptability of a construction is a function of cumulative violation costs.

Three case studies of contact-induced grammatical innovations in Hiberno-English (Irish English) are presented, with a view to determining a realistic and descriptively adequate syntactic analysis of the mechanisms of syntactic replication under language contact. The case studies deal with a range of different tense-aspect constructions and the morpho-syntax of subordinating clause constructions. It is argued that an approach based on the “construction”, a holistically represented complex form-function mapping as a central cognitive unit of storage and mental representation, offers a plausible and intuitive way of modelling the cross-linguistic identification processes that must be at the heart of what happens in the mind of the bilingual speaker in actuating contact-induced change.

Which properties of a cliticization system can be borrowed relatively easily and which ones are harder to adapt due to external influence? This article examines the contact situation of the Cimbrian dialect spoken in Luserna as a starting point for a discussion of this question. It presents new data on a German variety which has been exposed to intensive contact with Italian and its local varieties over several generations. The article shows that certain peculiarities of the Cimbrian cliticization system result on the one hand from word order changes and on the other hand from the imitation and integration of the model language’s strategies for mapping information structure onto sentence form.