Question formation and language contact in the Northern Basque Country (PPP Frankreich)

Description

The project deals with word order variation in wh-interrogative clauses inbr Northern Basque. The aim is to describe and to analyse this variation andbr investigate whether it may be connected to language contact, namely to thebr contact of Northern Basque with Gascon and/or French. While there is somebr research on interrogatives in Southern Basque spoken in the Spanish Basquebr Country, it is only recently that interrogation in Northern Basque has becomebr the subject of research. In connection with the results of this research thebr project will establish more sophisticated questionnaires in order to test thesebr results and to investigate the influence of language contact. Most importantly,br while previous research almost only considers the influence of French in thisbr respect, the project also focuses on the influence of Gascon, the languagebr which has been in contact with Northern Basque for many centuries.br Basque, and the Romance languages in contact with it, are typologically verybr distant languages. The research carried out during the project will provide abr privileged standpoint from which to evaluate the potential syntactic andbr morphological constraints operating in grammatical borrowing, an importantbr point of contention in the actual debates on language contact.

Institutions
  • Department of Linguistics
Funding sources
Name Finanzierungstyp Kategorie Project no.
Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst third-party funds research funding program
Further information
Period: 01.01.2015 – 31.12.2016