WALSERSPRACHE - The four main objectives of the Alpine Space ...

LA PERIFRASI CON “FARE” NEL DIALETTO WALSER DI GRESSONEY
in the present indicative. The auxiliary “tue” merely helps conjugate the main verb. It has
no semantic function whatsoever. To further peruse this matter I devised a number of sentences
in Italian which were then translated and discussed with native Walser speakers,
alongside with a number of sentences in Titsch which make up an acceptability test. The
purpose of this test was to confirm the trends emerging from translation data. I gathered
this data recording with a visible tape-recorder the translations supplied by the informants
after they had read the Italian text. As for the elaboration of the data thus obtained,
I annotated the sentences I obtained in Titsch with the help of a native speaker. Sentence
structures where the auxiliary “to do” is used in combination with the infinitive of the
main verb are not exclusive to the Gressoney dialect, nor are they to be found solely in
Walser dialects in North-western Italy. They are quite widespread in many German and
English dialects, as well as in other languages of the Germanic family. These sentence
structures however may take on diverse tasks, which says a lot about the great versatility
of the verb “to do”. It can codify a verb’s time and mode, underscore clause subordination,
form a causative clause or assert pragmatic statements. Taking as a starting point
a study on periphrastic sentence structure in the dialect of Formazza (Dal Negro), I
accordingly designed my questionnaire for Gressoney. Considering trends emerging from
Dal Negro and other studies on Gressoney’s dialect (Zürrer), I focussed on four specific
points: 1) present indicative, 2) imperative, 3) subjunctive I and 4) subjunctive II. Both
the perfect tense and other periphrastic structures were only marginally considered, since
in other German dialects they have not the auxiliary “to do”. A similar pattern was
expected to surface in our dialect, as it was indeed confirmed by gathered data (for a
more in-depth study Cfr. Angster 2006). The causative use of the auxiliary “tue” was also
probed. Most of the data was gathered from the use of the present tense, whereby links
among the use of the present, the verbs’ action classes, the auxiliaries and the “kurzverben”
were analysed. Data gathered on the use of the subjunctive confirm the trends as
per WKZ 1988a. To clarify the employment of imperative periphrastic forms I checked data
on the imperative against those on the indicative. Finally, the periphrastic use of “to do” in
structured sentences was that of “tunz” plus infinitive. Analysing the data gathered by
submitting the questionnaire to four native speakers I obtained the following: 1) auxiliaries
“to be” and “to have”, as well as modal verbs, cannot be supported by “tue”, either
as auxiliaries or main verbs. Some verbs may be used independently, although their use
with “tue” is also recurrent. A wider gap of indecisiveness occurs with “Kurzverben”.
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