Volume 67, Issue 4 - Special Issue: German complementizers in contact

The study provides a sketch of the complementizer system of the German language island Deutschpilsen (Hungary). After laying out the basic facts, the structural position of subordinating items in the embedded clause is discussed, also in comparison to the contact language, Hungarian. The second main issue is the systematic distribution of inversion, verb-second and verb-final word order in embedded clauses. Regarding the tendency of embedded-V2, a parallel is drawn between the analyzed dialect and Standard German. In all cases, the minor influence of Hungarian as the host contact language is examined.

Walser German is an archaic variety of Alemannic still spoken in few isolated communities in the Italian Alps. These dialects are characterized by extreme variability, language contact and decay. Moreover, they have developed independently from one another, partly because of different sociolinguistic conditions and partly because lack of contact from one another. Today, this variety of linguistic outcomes and sociolinguistic contexts offers us wealth of linguistic material that can help us reconstruct the development of innovative syntactic structures in subordination and of a mixed system of complementizers.

The aim of this contribution is twofold: (i) providing a detailed description of subordination in Cimbrian and (ii) discussing the concept of language contact in terms of feature transfer. As has been recently pointed out, Cimbrian declarative and relative clauses display a unique pattern among the German dialects w.r.t. embedding. In fact, different complementizers trigger different syntax as regards the position of the finite verb. In our contribution, we extend the analysis to adverbial clauses for the first time and also investigate the double pattern of embedding in indirect wh-questions. Our data suggest that contact-induced syntactic change can be explained in terms of transfer of single abstract features.

In this article I demonstrate that in two varieties of Mòcheno, a German dialect spoken by about 600 people in the Fersina valley (Trentino, Northern Italy), referential null subjects can be licensed in main, but not in embedded clauses. This particular root-embedded asymmetry, known as “asymmetric pro -drop ” (Benincà 1984), had until now been considered to be fully absent from modern Romance (Benincà 2006) and German varieties (cf. Volodina & Weiß 2012). Through an examination of Old High German, Old Italian and modern Romance varieties, I show that asymmetric pro-drop is not an innovation introduced by contact with modern Romance varieties, but must be considered a conservative feature of older German varieties that has probably been maintained because it is shared with older Romance varieties (cf. Benincà 1994).

Kansas Bukovina Bohemian has recently developed a verbal 1 pl agreement marker. It is shown that this marker has its origins in the C-oriented cliticization of 1 pl subject pronouns. Their reanalysis as C-oriented 1 pl agreement markers has brought about double agreement effects that are controlled by the syntactic positioning of the finite verb. Since subordinated structures increasingly feature left-headed TPs due to linguistic influence from American English, the former 1 pl enclitics nowadays fully integrate into the verbal conjugation while double agreement is getting lost. The retention of double agreement on one specific auxiliary results from a process of inter-paradigmatic homonymy flight.

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.

This paper investigates the multiple functions of wo in the complementizer position of relative and non-relative clauses in Texas German (= TxG), a critically endangered diaspora dialect of German, in order to determine whether its distribution is unique or comparable to that of wo in Standard German. We further attempt to determine whether the different functions of wo in the complementizer position are due to internal or external factors. Finally, we address the question of whether the variability of wo is perhaps indicative of the imminent demise of TxG.

Misionero German (MG), a variety of heritage German spoken in the Misiones Province of Argentina, allows the interrogative pronoun was ‘what’ to function as a relative pronoun in similar and analogous contexts to those found in Brazilian Portuguese. We argue that this shift in the grammar is the result of replica grammaticalization, likely due to extreme contact with Brazilian Portuguese over the course of the last century.

In this paper I discuss three properties of Brazilian Pomeranian, a Germanic language spoken in Espirito Santo, Brazil by descendents who emigrated in the 19th century. These three aspects of the verbal system are: 1. The relation between complex complementizers, a two-infinitive system, and split infinitives, previously discussed in van Gelderen (1993, 1998) and Schallert (2012, 2013), 2. Verb Projection Raising (VPR), as discussed by Riemsdijk 2002, Haegeman 2007, Salzmann 2011, and Brandner & Salzmann 2012, and 3. Verb-Second positioning of verbal clusters, previously discussed in Vos (2005). I discuss novel Pomeranian data from the perspective of the literature on these three topics, which have been thus far studied largely separately from one another. An integrated discussion sheds light on the nature and the proper analysis of these three phenomena. I argue that these phenomena are caused by the “weaknesses” of T. The weakness of T can be resolved “downward” by copying features onto T under selection by a higher head (agree), or can be resolved “upward” under head movement of T.