Kolmer
Fakultäten » Philosophische Fakultät » Deutsches Seminar » Linguistik » Prof. Dr. Elvira Glaser » Kolmer
Completed research project
| Title / Titel | Pronominal clitics in Cimbro. A case study into investigations of external motivated grammatical change at the germanic-romance language border | ||
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| Abstract (PDF, 14 KB) | |||
| Original title / Originaltitel | Pronominalklitika im Cimbro. Untersuchungen zum grammatischen Wandel einer deutschen Minderheitensprache in romanischer Umgebung | ||
| Summary / Zusammenfassung | The Cimbrian language, which has been the first language to more than 30'000 people in the so called Sette comuni, Tredici comuni and the elevated plain of Folgaria and Lavarone in the 17th and 18th century, is almost extinct nowadays. All the settlements in the provinces of Veneto and Trentino were founded during the late middle ages in the 12th and 13th century. First of all, lexical and phonological correspondences and similarities of the Cimbrian language varieties with modern Bavarian varieties undoubtedly confirm the genetic affiliation of these speech island dialects as (south) Bavarian. Nowadays, after centuries of language maintenance in a romance speaking environment, one can find speakers still fluent in both the local Italian dialects and the German dialect called Cimbro, only in Luserna, a small village near Trient. Luserna emerged last as a Cimbrian speech community in the 17th century as a secondary settlement of Lavarone. Full competence in Cimbro is found especially among the old generation, which can be classified as bilingual. The thesis explores external motivated grammatical changes in the domain of pronominal clitics. The investigation is based on data from bilingual speakers of Luserna. Besides the "outer" German / Bavarian shape of Cimbro the "inner" shape has undergone drastic restructuring due to the intense contact with Standard Italian and the surrounding North Italian varieties. Both Bavarian and Northern Italian dialects show pronominal clitics, a special class or "second series" of pronominal elements in addition to stressed personal pronouns. These pronominal clitics (in Bavarian, Cimbro and Northern Italian dialects) are called special clitics with a different distributional behavior than their stressed counterparts. There are considerable differences between the properties of clitics and cliticization in Bavarian on the one side and the features of clitics and cliticization processes of the Northern Italian type on the other side (those differences mainly concern 1) the category of the syntactic basis for cliticization, 2) the internal sequence of clitics in a clitic cluster and 3) the position of the clitics before or after the syntactic basis). Pronominal clitics in Cimbro behave in some respects more like Italian / Romance clitics whereas in other respects more like Bavarian ones. For example, there is no evidence for a switch from encliticizaition to procliticization in Cimbro. This implies that it is especially difficult to adopt this feature of cliticization in processes of external motivated grammatical change even in very intense language contact situations. From a functional point of view, subject and object clitics in Cimbro have adopted agreement functions very similar to the regularities in Galloromance varieties. The altered function as agreement markers in Cimbro is intimately connected with the reduction of differences to the model language concerning word order and with the integration of focus strategies from the model language into patterns already and still existing in the replica language. The picture drawn from the results of the investigation of pronominal clitics in Cimbro is best interpreted as a case of typological change at the morphosyntactic level, which is the consequence of a very long lasting phase of stable bilingualism. |
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| Publications / Publikationen | Kolmer, Agnes: Neueste Forschungen zum phonologischen Wandel im südbairischen Sprachinseldialekt von Luserna: Die Segmentalisierung der nasalierten Diphthonge /ua/ und /ya/ zu /uma/ bzw. /yma/ im Cimbro. In: Krämer-Neubert, Sabine/Wolf, Norbert Richard (Hrsg.): Bayerische Dialektologie, Akten der Internationalen Dialektologischen Konferenz .26-28. Februar 2002 . Heidelberg, Winter, 2005. S. 349-361.Kolmer, Agnes: Subjektklitika als Kongruenzmarkierer: Ein Vergleich zwischen bairischen und alemannischen Sprachinseldialekten in Norditalien (Zimbrisch und Walserdeutsch). In: Bidese, Ermenegildo/Dow, James R./Stolz, Thomas (Hrsg.): Das Zimbrische zwischen Germanisch und Romanisch. /(//Diversitas Linguarum/ /9/ /)/, Bochum, Brockmeyer, 2005. S. 164-189.Kolmer, Agnes: L'elemento /da/ come espletivo della posizione del soggetto enclitico pronominale nel Cimbro di Luserna. In: Breu, Walter (Hrsg.): L'influsso dell'italiano sulla grammatica delle lingue minoritarie. Problemi di morfologia e sintassi. Atti del Convegno Internazionale - Costanza, 8 - 11 ottobre 2003. /(//Studi e testi di Albanistica/ /17/ /)/, Università della Calabria, Rende, 2005. S. 55-78.Kolmer, Agnes/Helmut Weiß : Infinitivkonstruktionen im Zimbrischen und Bairischen. In: Germanistik im Kontaktraum Europa II. Internat. Symposion, Maribor 18-20. April. Sammelband 1: Linguistik: hrsg. von der Pädagogischen Fakultät Maribor und dem Institut für Germanistik, Redaktion: Karmen Teržan Kopecky, Teodor Petri. Pedagoška fakulteta, Maribor, 2003. S. 134-153. | ||
| Keywords / Suchbegriffe | clitics, pronouns, language contact, grammatical change, cimbrian, bavarian, german, minority, Italy | ||
| Project leadership and contacts / Projektleitung und Kontakte |
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| Funding source(s) / Unterstützt durch |
Universität Zürich (position pursuing an academic career), Foundation Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) (2000-2002) |
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| Duration of Project / Projektdauer | Jan 2000 to Feb 2007 |