Relativism and Universalism in Linguistics - Fachbereich 10 ...

170 Workshops
restructuring due to the intense contact with Standard Italian and the surrounding North Italian
varieties. After discussing the reasons for the extreme prolongation of language shift in this
speech community (particularly endogamy, geographical seclusion and agricultural basis of
living) the focus of the talk shifts to the description of the use of subject and object clitics.
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.
What has changed in Hiberno-English:
Constructions, “usage patterns” and/or discourse preferences
Pietsch, Lukas
University of Hamburg
lukas.pietsch@uni-hamburg.de
Scholars of language contact have developed a large range of different terms to describe
processes whereby a language takes over grammatical structures from a second language:
“transfer”, “borrowing”, “replication”, “interference”, etc. Often, however, when these terms
are used it is left open what exactly the status of the linguistic entities is that are the object of
the change. In this way, studies of contact-induced grammatical change often make little
contact with syntactic research and syntactic theory in a narrower sense. Any theoretically
explicit account of contact-induced grammatical change will have to include some way in
which bilingual speakers construct analogy relations between elements in their two respective
language systems. Something in the donor language is perceived as functionally or
structurally equivalent to an existent or emergent something in the receiving language. But
what kinds of somethings (“rules”, “structures”, “patterns”, “strategies”) are these, and what
is their status within each of the language systems?
It will be suggested in this talk that Construction Grammar (Goldberg 1995, Croft 2001), with
its emphasis on “constructions” as the dominant organising principle of grammars, and its
natural affinity to usage-based models of language change – as employed, for instance, in
grammaticalisation studies – is particularly suitable to describe and explain some of the
properties observed in contact-induced change. Among these properties are its local,